Turning Ocean Garbage Into Helpful Prosthetics, and More – Chicago News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Chicago business schools this week.
How “Speed Factories” Help Companies Adapt to Capricious Consumers – Kellogg Insight
In a new study co-authored by Northwestern Kellogg Professor of Managerial Economics and Operations Jan Van Mieghem, Vlerick Business School’s Robert Boute, and Cardiff Business School’s Stephen Disney, the trio survey the return on investment for “speed factories” or local-market facilities “designed to quickly pump out products with shorter life cycles and less predictable demand.”
In the e-commerce age, speed factories are in high demand for manufacturers of realms of sneakers and sports apparel where they “offer fast turnaround to meet demand [for] custom-made products for very small local markets.”
Van Mieghem writes, “Amazon and fast-fashion trends mean that companies have had to increase their speed from product design to delivering that product to customers. If things must happen in days or weeks rather than months, you can’t be doing that from somewhere in Asia.”
The catch is that production costs are often extremely high. However, the trio found that speed factories are “worthwhile, despite their cost, and are best used as part of a portfolio of on and offshore production.”
Van Mieghem adds, “It’s about maintaining the flexibility to bring certain products in and move others out of a speed factory as needed.”
You can read more about the trio’s research here.
Anacortes Couple Turns Ocean Plastics into Prosthetics – K5 News
Gies College of Business Online MBA (iMBA) student and Anacortes, Washington resident Chris Moriarty and his wife Laura co-created the nonprofit Million Waves Project, which “takes littered plastics from the beaches for use in the creation of prosthetics.”
According to a recent profile on Seattle’s K5 News, “It takes just 15 plastic bottles, $45, and two-and-a-half days to make one hand. The couple uses open source software, a company that processes the plastic into filament and a 3-D printer.
In the K5 profile, Chris said, “We thought, wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to take something deplorable in one sense and something heartbreaking in another, put them together and see what we could do.”
Laura adds, “It is daunting. Life is daunting. But like we tell our kids, that doesn’t mean you don’t move forward and try.”
Taking Stock of Market Uncertainty – Quinlan School of Business Stories
The Loyola University Quinlan School of Business blog recently profiled Assistant professor Hae mi Choi, Ph.D. about her research on how macroeconomics and market uncertainty influence financial analysts’ incentives over time.
Professor Choi explained that “financial analysts’ incentives and their forecasting performances are affected by market uncertainty, [which is] when investors have difficulty assessing the current and future market conditions because there is a lot of volatility within the market.”
Choi explains the value of her research to Quinlan students:
“If you want to be a good investor, you need to not only understand what’s going on within a firm, but also the macroeconomic conditions and the stock market conditions in general. Understanding how other investors in the stock market process information and how financial markets function is fundamental, as it impacts the wealth of us all.”
You can read the full interview here.
Coffee Brains, Case Writing, and More – New York News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from New York business schools this week.
This Is Your Brain On Coffee: Beyond Health Benefits, Even the Smell May Fuel Higher Test Scores – Stevens Institute of Technology College of Business Blog
New research published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology finally confirmed your suspicion: yes, your coffee is making you smarter. Well, maybe. Science is tricky and all that.
In the research, officially released earlier this year, Stevens School of Business professor Adriana Madzharov and colleagues from Temple and Baruch found that the scent of coffee helped people perform tasks better and even improved test scores. Interestingly enough, the researchers concluded that the effect of even just smelling coffee could be as beneficial as consuming it.
“It’s not just that the coffee-like scent helped people in our study perform better on analytical tasks, which was already interesting,” Madzharov writes. “But they also thought they would do better, and we demonstrated that this expectation was at least partly responsible for their improved performance. In short, smelling a coffee-like scent, which has no caffeine in it, still has a placebo effect similar to drinking coffee.”
New research reveals that the scent of coffee can help you with daily tasks and tests, even if you do not consume it.
She adds, “This finding also has useful multiple practical implications in business for workplace professionals, architects, building developers, retail space managers and others.”
You can read the full article here.
A Rutgers Team Brings a Professor’s Lesson to Life – Rutgers Business School Blog
Rutgers Business School Professor of Marketing Can (John) Uslay recently took home first place in a recent case-writing competition put together by the University of Michigan’s William Davidson Institute.
Professor Uslay’s entry was based on Roshni Rides, a “rickshaw transportation company created and piloted by a team of Rutgers Business School students,” which won the “$1 million Hult Prize for social entrepreneurship in 2017 after a compelling presentation about how their company could help improve the lives of refugees living in the Orangi Town settlement.
Professor Uslay outlined “the challenges the team faced, specifically their effort to find a price point that would keep the cost of the service affordable and still enable the company to grow.”
You can check out the full interview with Professor Uslay here.
The Business Case for Sustainable Tourism Management of Protected Areas – SC Johnson Business Feed
Tom Olson, a recent Johnson Cornell MBA graduate, recently published an op-ed about the growing need for “developed, emerging, and frontier markets” to develop more sustainable management structures to accommodate increased tourism.
Enter the Tourism and Protected Area Specialist (TAPAS) Group; a subgroup of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) “dedicated to advancing sustainable tourism initiatives in protected areas.”
Olson writes that he was tasked by TAPAS Group to “analyze, develop, and recommend a revenue generation model that would be financially sustainable, align with IUCN’s values, and be accepted by the broader community of sustainable tourism professionals.”
You can read Olson’s full op-ed here.
Paid Maternity Leave Increasing, and More – New York News
Pack up the pool gear and beach towels: let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from New York business schools this week.
Father’s Day Data: Columbia Business School Research Demonstrates Popularity of Paid Paternity Leave – Columbia Business Blog
How has the culture of paid maternity leave been changing recently? New research from the Columbia Business School explores the topic, which has increased for 12 percent of private-sector workers in the U.S. There is still no current federal law requiring the implementation of paid maternity leave, leaving the U.S. with the precarious title as the only “industrialized” country in the world without a federally-mandated law. Individual states, however, can implement the policy, which has been increasing since the early 2000s.
Earlier this year, New York became the fourth state in the U.S. to create policy regarding paid maternity leave, alongside New Jersey, Rhode Island, and California, which implemented the law back in 2004. According to the article, “California’s paid family leave produced a 46-percent increase in fathers taking time off to bond with newborn and newly-adopted children.”
CBS professor Ann Bartel writes, “This study should help inform the conversation around paid leave, because research shows it is fundamentally a family issue – appealing to both mothers and fathers. At its core, paid family leave is a ‘dad’ issue as much as it is a ‘mom’ issue. As Father’s Day approaches, our research demonstrates that fathers will greatly utilize paid family leave if it is offered, and their employers are supportive of them taking that important time away from the job.”
You can read more about “Paid Family Leave, Fathers’ Leave‐Taking, and Leave‐Sharing in Dual‐Earner Households,” which was published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, here.
How Social Media’s Powerful ‘Silent Majority’ Moves Bitcoin Prices – Stevens Institute of Technology Blog
Stevens Institute of Technology School of Business professor Feng Mai recently led an investigation to understand how social media public sentiment can significantly manipulate the value of bitcoin.
Professor Mai’s research, which was published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, encompassed scholars from Ivey, Dickinson, and the University of Cincinnati, all of whom “collected and analyzed two years’ worth of forum posts on the world’s most popular public bitcoin forum, Bitcointalk.”
The team found that “periods of increasingly positive social media commentary do in fact influence the rising price of Bitcoin significantly.” Mai writes, “We wanted to know who is affecting the price: a vocal minority, who may be biased, or the quieter majority, who do not seem to have a reason to be untruthful, or both.”
According to the article, “the “silent majority” — infrequent Twitter and Bitcointalk users who took the time to comment on the cryptocurrency’s prospects — moved prices more, as much as ten times more, when they posted positive comments.”
Mai writes, “This was a big finding, and it does seem to prove that people are trusting the silent majority much more, perhaps because they do not seem to have an agenda.”
Check out the full Stevens’ article here.
Johnson Women MBAs Boast Record-Breaking Attendance at Forté Conference – Johnson School of Management Business Feed
As we recently highlighted, Cornell’s S.C. Johnson School of Management reported that 49 Cornell students attended this year’s FortéMBA Women’s Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia—29 from the two-year MBA program, seven from the one-year program, and 13 from the Johnson Cornell Tech MBA program.
The Forté Conference brings “together admitted, enrolling, and current women MBAs from Forté sponsor business schools to explore career paths, meet recruiters and mentors, and hear from today’s most influential businesswomen.”
This year’s conference featured keynote speaker Joanna Lipman, veteran journalist, chief content officer of Gannet, editor-in-chief of USA Today, and author of That’s What She Said, who spoke on “gender bias in the workplace and provided tips for how women can leverage their value.”
In addition to a Power Pitch session and a number of workshopsand panels on “on communications strategies, interviewing, design thinking, sustainable and socially responsible careers, LinkedIn, and the future of feminism, among others,” the conference also included talks from Accenture North American CEO Julie Sweet and State Street EVP and Deputy Global Chief Investment Officer Lori Heinel.
Anne Latham, Two-Year MBA ’20, writes of her experience:
“The Forte Leadership Conference was an incredible few days. I walked away feeling fortunate to have met so many of my incredible female classmates! The Dialogue with Leadership session, moderated by Dean Erika James, featuring Lori Heinel and Julie Sweet, was a particular favorite of mine, due to their incredibly engaging and thought provoking remarks. I hope we all continue to live by Julie’s advice: ‘If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough!’”
You can read the full article from Cornell here.
The Value of Choosing a Research-Focused MBA Program at UW Foster
How important is faculty research to choosing your MBA program? Should you care if you go to a research university or is it all just white smoke? Is there value in choosing a research-focused MBA program?
We know that faculty matter. According to a paper written by researchers at Indiana University and Michigan State University titled “Faculty Do Matter: The Role of College Faculty in Student Learning and Engagement,” faculty have a significant impact on student learning and the overall educational experience.
“The impact that a faculty member can have on the student experience can be seen in and out of the classroom,” the study explained. “We found that faculty behaviors and attitudes affect students profoundly, which suggests that faculty members may play the single-most important role in student learning.”
But what about faculty research, is it important? Continue reading…
McDonough Professor Douglas McCabe Honored With New Award
Georgetown Professor Douglas McCabe of the McDonough School of Business was recently honored with the “Best Paper Award” at the 2017 Annual Conference of the American Society for Competitiveness in Washington DC. This year’s conference theme was “Breaking Down Barriers to Competitiveness: A Path Forward.”
McCabe’s paper was titled “Conflict Resolution and Organizational Justice in the Workplace—The Evidence Based Research” and discussed current evidence-based research on how employees can achieve justice, equity, and voice within organizations.
“Conflict and its resolution play a critical role in organizations,” McCabe said. “A growing proportion of companies and corporations have turned to various dispute resolution procedures to resolve the complaints and grievances of their employees within the organizational behavior context.”
McCabe’s work has already become more than just research, having been put into practice at progressive firms. “Many of these quality and legitimate systems were put into place based upon the policy recommendations of my stream of research, as well as the research of other human resource management scholars,” he said.
This was the fourth Best Paper Award McCabe has earned during his career at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. The professor of management has worked at McDonough since 2013, teaching EMBA and management classes. Additional awards earned by McCabe include:
- Recipient of the Award for the Best Conceptual Research Paper at the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the American Society for Competitiveness
- Recipient of the Best Paper Award at the Fourth Annual World Business Congress of the International Management Development Association
- Recipient of the Best Professor Award of the inaugural class of the Executive Master’s in Leadership/District of Columbia Public School Principals at the McDonough School of Business
- Recipient of the Excellence in Education Award of the Labor and Employment Relations Association
- Twice Recipient of the Joseph F. LeMoine Award for Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching Excellence of the McDonough School of Business
- Twice the Recipient of the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the Emerald Literarti Network of the Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Additionally
- Recipient of the Certificate of Recognition from the National Office of The Phi Beta Kappa Society
McCabe earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University, his M.S. from Loyola University of Chicago, and his B.A. magna cum laude (Phi Beta Kappa) from Marquette University. Along with his written work in numerous academic refereed journal articles, papers, monographs, and speeches, he is also an active domestic and international management consultant.
Stanford Study Explains Why Smoking Persists
Despite an overwhelming amount of information linking smoking and disease, new Stanford GSB research finds that there are actually persistent misunderstandings among American smokers.
