In the book Build, Borrow, or Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma the late Professor Will Mitchell and his co-author Laurence Capron developed a groundbreaking framework showing how firms can dynamically manage their resource portfolios and choose an appropriate growth strategy in turbulent market environments fraught with institutional, technological, and economic challenges. This comprehensive framework integrates the capability-based perspective with the principles of transaction cost economics. The intellectual origins of the capability-based perspective are deeply rooted in the foundational work in the strategy field carried out at the University of Michigan around 1980. Mitchell's foundational framework has not only shaped the research agendas of scholars interested in central questions in corporate strategy but also influenced practitioners who are faced with the perpetual strategic conundrum of how best to grow their firms.

From 1990-1993, Michigan Ross housed the Minority Summer Institute with support from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and the Graduate Management Admission Council. MSI was designed to increase the number of minority faculty in business and management education. 

Each year, 30 Black, Hispanic, and Native American college students were selected to participate in MSI's six-week program. While at Ross, the students were involved in a series of classes, informational sessions, and presentations that provided a first-hand introduction to doctoral studies and the life and work of business professors. 

According to Dave Wilson, former president of GMAC, "When one thinks about changing the world, the MSI initiative must be seen as a resounding success." Following the last offering of MSI, the KPMG Foundation initiated the PhD Project, which has continued the mission of MSI. The PhD Project reports that the number of underrepresented business professors in the United States has risen from 294 in 1994 to more than 1,700 today.

"Co-creation as a revolutionary paradigm was introduced by Professors C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy in a series of articles published between 2000 and 2004 and an award-winning book, The Future of Competition. Their work provided a new frame of reference for jointly creating value through networked environments of increasingly digitalized experiences, going beyond goods and services, and called for a process of co-creation -- the practice of developing offerings, experiences, and unique value through ongoing interactions with customers, employees, managers, financiers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders. Through their work, they envisioned an individual and experience-centric view of interactive value creation and innovation.

Starting in 2005, the explosion of digital and social media, the convergence of technologies and industries, embedded intelligence, and information technology-enabled services enabled enterprises to build platforms for large-scale, ongoing interactions among the firm, its customers, and its extended network. Ramaswamy's work argued that success lies in connecting with people's experiences to generate insights and change the nature and quality of interactions. He also called for co-creation from the inside out of enterprises and their networks, as much as co-creation from the outside in, and for leaders to co-create transformative pathways.

In 2014, Ramaswamy published "The Co-Creation Paradigm", which combined the core ideas of co-creation with a call to see, think, and act differently in an interconnected world of possibilities and complex challenges to co-create a better future as individuals."

In 1985, Professor M.P. Narayanan published a paper on managers' proclivity to focus on the short- rather than the long-term. His paper is a rigorous and theoretical explanation that requires the manager to have private information. Narayanan shows that the manager's proclivity to focus on the short-term is more evident in a less experienced manager but is attenuated if the business's riskiness and the contract's length increase. While singling out the importance of the short- and long-term conflict as the basis for the myopic behavior of firms may be a challenge, this phenomenon is ever-present.

Professor George Siedel was a pioneer in developing the concept of law as a source of competitive advantage. This concept originated in his 2002 book: Using the Law for Competitive Advantage. In an article in the Academy of Management Executive, Robert Thomas (past president of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business), concluded that the book "is trailblazing in its assertion that legal issues are critical strategic variables in business planning." Siedel later emphasized an international dimension to his work in his 2010 book: Proactive Law for Managers: A Hidden Source of Competitive Advantage. This work has served as a foundation for academic and practitioner interest in the design and simplification of contracts and other legal documents.

Professor Kenneth Lieberthal was a pioneer in the practice of business school professors contributing their knowledge in public service to society. Lieberthal served as the senior director for Asia for the U.S. National Security Council during the years 1998-2000. 

During that same time, Lieberthal was also special assistant to President Clinton for National Security Affairs. His core academic research findings included a seminal analysis of China's bureaucratic system, which featured a nuanced and careful delineation of the fragmented nature of China's political system in the late 20th century. 

Lieberthal's research was able to explain why China, during that era, had weak policy implementation at times because of the fragmentation in its bureaucratic system. He was known for introducing U.S. policymakers to a nuanced and careful understanding of the Chinese governmental system and how it functions.

Michigan Ross is known for being one of the first places to promote and provide rigorous evidence contrary to the efficient market hypothesis. The work of Professor Victor Bernard, a faculty member from 1982-1995, played a huge role in the beginnings of literature on market inefficiency. His work in valuation and fundamental analysis was the first to provide evidence that investors could not fully process information in earnings releases. The inefficient markets argument was further supported by the work of Professor Richard Sloan, a faculty member from 1997-2007. Bernard demonstrated that market participants treat the two basic components of accounting — cash and accruals — in an irrational way when making their valuation of corporate securities. This behavior became known as the "accrual anomaly." Bernard's work twice won the Notable Contribution to the Accounting Literature Award. 

The marketing faculty at the University of Michigan has, over the decades, made several foundational contributions to the area of consumer behavior. Professor Joseph W. Newman, who was a marketing faculty member at the Michigan Business School from 1949-51 and again from 1965-73, helped greatly through his books and research publications to deepen the impact on the marketing discipline of concepts including economics and decision theory, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, especially through the qualitative research techniques of motivational research. Along with his doctoral students, he published highly impactful research on how consumers gather and use pre-purchase information. He also published research on customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. For these and other contributions, he was named a fellow of the Association of Consumer Research in 1990, its highest honor. In the decades since, the marketing faculty at Michigan Ross has continued to make many more notable contributions to our understanding of consumer behavior.

The article "Social Distancing as a Control Mechanism" by Professor James Westphal, is part of a larger stream of research that developed a more sociological perspective on corporate leadership and governance, an area of scholarship that had been largely dominated by economic perspectives into the 1990s. In a series of studies, Westphal and colleagues revealed a collection of social and psychological mechanisms by which governance policies, structures, and practices that were assumed to promote the economic interests of shareholders and other stakeholders were frequently subverted in ways that served the interests of powerful corporate elites. One such mechanism was "social distancing," a social sanction in which corporate directors who participated in governance reforms that threatened to increase board control over top management at one firm were socially isolated and even ostracized at other firms where they served on the board. They were less likely to be invited to informal meetings, and other directors were less likely to build on their comments and suggestions or solicit their opinions on strategic issues in formal board meetings. Directors who experienced social distancing, witnessed it firsthand, or were socially connected to a director who experienced it, were less likely to participate subsequently in elite-threatening actions. In that sense, the social distancing that Westphal identified parallels and anticipates the social distancing that we all learned about and practiced during the COVID-19 pandemic. But unlike social distancing during a pandemic, social distancing in corporate leadership, like the other social and psychological mechanisms that the authors uncovered, helped maintain a system that serves the interests of a powerful few rather than the many who depend on it for employment, goods and services, and wealth creation.

If people don’t pay much attention to the ads when they watch TV, they can’t possibly think a lot about what the ads are saying. How, then, does advertising have the effects on consumer buying that it does? Showing that emotional responses evoked by the ad play an important role was a major research contribution by Rajeev Batra, Michigan Ross marketing professor. Batra came to U-M in 1989 from Columbia University, where he began this research stream. Over 10 years at MichiganRoss, he grew this research stream to show more clearly how these ad-evoked emotions interacted with the ads’ more rational content, what the different types of ad-evoked emotions were and how they could be measured accurately, and how they shaped consumers’ liking for and perceptions about brands. His co-authored papers on these topics have been cited more than 8,000 times, and he has twice been listed among the most influential scholars in the study of advertising. The methods he developed for measuring the types and effectiveness of emotional ads have also been incorporated into copy-testing systems at multiple ad agencies.

In her research published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Human Resources, Health Affairs, and other outlets, Professor Sarah Miller has used quasi-experimental methods to evaluate whether receiving improved access to health care in utero, in early childhood, and throughout childhood improves outcomes in adulthood. Miller and her co-authors have found that children who have received eligibility for health insurance through the Medicaid program have improved outcomes on a number of dimensions, both in terms of health and economic outcomes. Additionally, they found that the children of those children who had better access to healthcare in childhood were healthier at birth. This suggests a cycle in which investing in children's health today can have multigenerational benefits that allow the government to fully recoup the cost of its initial investment in the form of higher tax payments and lower spending on welfare programs. Miller's research has been discussed in numerous high-profile news outlets and has strongly impacted how academics and policymakers view investments in children. Furthermore, her papers have been cited nearly 500 times.

Originally launched by Michigan Ross Professor David Brophy and now organized and run by the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Midwest Growth Capital Symposium began as an opportunity to showcase innovative Michigan ventures seeking funding and connect them with venture capitalists, angel investors, industry stakeholders, and leaders from across the nation. 

Today, the Symposium provides a platform for pre-selected Midwest companies to present their business ideas and investment opportunities. These companies span various sectors, such as life sciences, healthcare, technology, food and agriculture, and energy. First held in 1980, the Symposium is the longest-running university-based venture fair of its kind, has gained recognition, and attracts attendees from across the country.

In the 1990s, a research team at Michigan Ross, led by Emeritus Professor Claes Fornell, created the American Customer Satisfaction Index. This groundbreaking project included Professors Eugene Anderson and Michael Johnson, as well as Research Scientist Jaesumg Cha and Barbara Everitt, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau. 

ACSI represents a paradigm shift in measuring market performance, offering a more complete view of firms, industries, and economies and treats customer satisfaction as a latent construct connecting expectations, perceived quality and perceived value, through customer satisfaction, to customer voice and loyalty. For the past three decades, ACSI has catalyzed a wealth of peer-reviewed research in marketing and business. Empirical studies consistently find ACSI positively associated with profitability, cash flows, stock returns, credit ratings, positive earnings surprises, revenue, gross margins, return on investment, cash flow stability, and operating margins. Greater ACSI is also associated with lower cost of capital, cost of debt, and selling costs. At a macro level, ACSI is found to be predictive of gross domestic product. 

Published research by the ACSI team enjoys wide recognition, garnering more than 100,000 citations. Additionally, ACSI-related research has played an outsized role in establishing customer satisfaction as an essential metric within firms' management information systems, priority setting, and key performance indicators.

Franchised chains have an outsize influence on the economy: firms involved in a variety of business activities are organized as franchised chains and they employed over 9.6 million workers in the United States in 2017 according to the Census Bureau. Professor Francine Lafontaine's pioneering work on franchising shows that the success of this organizational form across various sectors results from the franchisor and franchisee specializing in the activities they are best suited to. Specifically, the franchisor specializes in creating and supporting the business format and brand, where scale is especially beneficial, and the franchisee optimizes operations locally, where their knowledge and efforts are particularly valuable. Lafontaine's work in this area has informed the choices that franchisors make and the nature of the contracts they use, and also the debate over legislation that aims to address the alleged shortcomings of the franchising organizational form. 

Her work suggests caution in developing potential public policy changes as consumers, existing and potential franchisees, as well as their employees stand to lose in the long term if franchising becomes less competitive as a form of organization. More broadly, Lafontaine's research has made seminal contributions to our understanding of how firms interact with each other in the process of procuring inputs or distributing their products, and prompted her appointment as Director of the Bureau of Economics at the FTC in 2014-15. In particular, her research has shown that factors driving vertical integration and vertical contracting can be very different from those motivating horizontal mergers, so analyses of vertical mergers should start from a different premise compared to analyses of horizontal mergers. Her detailed analyses of franchise contract terms, as described in her book The Economics of Franchising, provide further reasons why, in her view, the rule of reason continues to be the right approach in antitrust cases involving vertical restraints.

Building on his experience as an attorney at the Federal Reserve, the 2020-22 research of Assistant Professor Jeremy Kress has identified critical weaknesses in bank merger oversight and proposed strategies to reinvigorate bank merger enforcement. Kress' work has shown that lax bank merger oversight has harmed consumers, businesses, and the broader financial system. His research has demonstrated that the prevailing approach to bank merger regulation has increased the cost and reduced the availability of consumer credit, inflated the fees that banks charge for basic financial services, limited small business credit availability, and threatened financial stability. Kress' research has pushed bank merger reform onto the policy agenda in Washington, D.C. by serving as a blueprint for legislation introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren and inspiring an executive order on bank mergers by President Joe Biden. The Department of Justice also invited Kress to lead a joint initiative with the federal banking agencies to rewrite their bank merger policies.

The original trading floor at the Michigan Business School was established in 1999. At the time, it was the 12th academic trading lab to be developed in the United States and one of the first in a large public university. 

Later, with a generous donation by John and Georgene Tozzi, a new lab was built. Over the years, thousands of students have come through the lab. 

Today, there are approximately a dozen investment clubs, seven of which meet weekly in the lab. When the lab was first getting started, the student-managed fund was at $95,000, which has since grown to $700,000.