Babson Olin Graduate School of Business Names Keith Rollag New Dean
Earlier this month, the Babson College F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business named its new dean: Keith Rollag. A management professor with over 17 years of experience teaching entrepreneurial leadership at Babson, Rollag was chosen for his campus leadership and his vision for the graduate school’s future. Continue reading…
MIT Sloan Debunks Entrepreneur Myths, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
The 20-Year-Old Entrepreneur is a Lie – MIT Sloan Newsroom
MIT Sloan School of Business professor Pierre Azoulay and Ph.D. student Daniel Kim used a new working paper as an opportunity to debunk the myth of the 20-year-old Silicon Valley tech-prodigy entrepreneur. The reality is that the average age of successful entrepreneurs veers closer to 42. Azoulay elaborates:
“If you knew nothing else, and you had two identical ideas, one proposed by a very young person, one proposed by a middle-aged person, and that’s the only thing you have to go on, you would be better off—if you wanted to predict success—betting on a middle-aged person.”
Kim adds: “In theory, we know that with age a lot of benefits accumulate. For instance, you get a lot of human capital from experience, you also get more financial resources as you age, as well as social connections, all of which will likely boost your odds of success as an entrepreneur.”
Read more about the duo’s research here.
Case Study: Can This Japanese Snack Food Company Break into the U.S. Market? – Harvard Business Review
As part of a fictionalized case study, HBR recently published a profile on Kenko USA, the American subsidiary of Japan’s largest rice cracker producer, about its ongoing plans to enter the American market. Kenko USA hopes to become synonymous with rice crackers much in the same way that Kikkoman became inextricably linked with soy sauce.
In 2012, Riku Nakamura relocated from Tokyo to San Mateo, California to oversee the launch of Kenko’s first foreign subsidiary. According to the article, “Riku knew that the key was to expand beyond Asian supermarkets and grocery stores’ “international” sections and get Kenko crackers into the snack aisles of mainstream U.S. food outlets, but his team’s efforts had yet to bear fruit.”
You can read the entire case study here.
Hybrid Strategy Leaves Auto Industry Leaders Playing Catch-up, Professor Says – D’Amore McKim News & Research
There’s quite a bit of chatter within the auto industry about the so-called “hybrid trap” in which established industry leaders have been forced to catch up to the hybrid strategies of more aggressive startups to varying degrees of success.
Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business‘ Jean C. Tempel professor of entrepreneurship and innovation Fernando Suarez explored this phenomenon in detail as part of an MIT Sloan Management Review article. He elaborates:
“Most established corporations follow the hybrid approach because it gives them peace of mind. It allows incumbents to convince themselves that they’re responding to technology-driven transformation in their industry when, in fact, they’re losing ground. They fall back on learned patterns, which slows development. When you are serious about going the route of new technology, you have to rethink all of your designs and processes.”
Read more about Suarez’s research here.
Sloan Management Review Announces Beckhard Winners
The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review announced that Hamid Bouchikhi and John R. Kimberly are the winners of the 2014 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the authors of the most outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development published from fall 2012 to summer 2013.
Richard Beckhard was one of the founders and architects of the field of organizational development. He was a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty for more than 20 years. A longtime friend of MIT Sloan Management Review, Beckhard was known for his efforts to help organizations function in a more humane and high-performing manner and to empower people to be agents of change.
