In the early 2000s, Professors Tim Fort and Cindy Schipani held the first conference on the role of business in promoting peace. The conference was attended by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and brought together individuals from academia, business, and government to discuss efforts that could be made to reduce violence in the world. It was concluded that there is a role of business, especially in serving as an unofficial ambassador or role model when conducting business internationally. This event set in motion the beginnings of a new research paradigm on "Peace Through Commerce."

The paper "Quantity Flexibility Contracts and Supply Chain Performance" by Professor Bill Lovejoy and his colleague, Andy Tsay from Santa Clara University, was published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management in 1999. The paper delves into the concept of quantity flexibility in supply chain contracts and its potential to deal with demand uncertainties. This influential work formally captured the practice of “funneling” variability over time, whereby more variability is tolerated in earlier planning phases and less tolerated over time as the delivery date approaches. This paper has specifically led to further studies on the optimal design and effectiveness of supply chain contracts, enhancing the field’s understanding of tactical and strategic issues in supply chain management. Researchers have built on Tsay and Lovejoy's model to study the application of QF contracts in different industrial contexts and their interactions with various supply chain configurations. The concept and modeling presented in this paper have become a prominent part of the academic discourse on supply chain coordination, influencing subsequent studies in inventory management, order variability, and supply chain profitability. Thus, the paper's impact is significant and broad, inspiring much-needed research on flexible, cooperative strategies for supply chain optimization.

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 developed by Professors Gretchen Spreitzer, Bob Quinn, Jane Dutton, and Laura Morgan Roberts through their research at the Center for Positive Organizations, the Reflected Best Self Exercise™ is a personal development tool that helps you to see who you are at your best, engaging you to live and work from this powerful place daily. Since its launch, the RBSE has helped thousands of executives, managers, employees, and students discover new potential. Unlike most other feedback tools, the RBSE isn't limited to self-assessment. It invites people from your life and works to share stories of moments they feel they've seen you at your best, surfacing what few of us become aware of otherwise. The RBSE enables you to gain insight into how your unique talents have positively impacted others and gives you the opportunity to further leverage your strengths at work and in life.

While concerns regarding corporate financial misreporting have persisted since the early 1900s, there were no rigorous methods that academics, market participants, and regulators could use to assess the accounting quality or the potential for financial misreporting when looking at a set of financial statements. Faculty members Patricia Dechow, Ilia Dichev, and several of their co-authors in the Michigan Accounting group developed several widely used models that allow users to assess the financial reporting quality of a set of financial statements and, more importantly, allow users to detect potential earnings management. These models and adaptations of these models continue to be used today, both in research and in accounting courses.

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.

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 2002, Professor Ravi Anupindi and his co-authors published the influential paper "Coordination and Flexibility in Supply Contracts with Options" in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. This work introduced an innovative model that integrated options into supply contracts, offering enhanced management of demand uncertainties in supply chains. The research highlighted the important potential role of options in attaining contractual flexibility to coordinate supply chain participants and improve overall efficiency. The paper influenced subsequent research on supply contract design and demand management, one of the major areas of supply chain management research in the past two decades.

The root of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 lay in poor-quality residential mortgage loans made by financial institutions. A set of academic research papers established that lenders made poorer quality loans when they anticipated selling the loans to investors rather than continuing to own the loans until they matured. When loans were sold, a complex securitization process led to a large distance between the originator of a mortgage and the final investor in the loans. Amit Seru, PhD '07, and co-authors established in an important series of papers that focused on 1) keeping most characteristics of loans the same, loans that were only marginally easier to securitize had significantly higher default rates than those that were marginally more difficult to securitize, 2) (in work with Professor Uday Rajan) securitized loans, the interest rate (which represents the compensation to investors for bearing the risk of default by the borrower) became an increasingly worse predictor of default in the build-up to the GFC, and 3) information passed on to investors by mortgage securitizers was limited and sometimes outright fraudulent. In another crucial strand of work, Professor Amiyatosh Purnanandam demonstrated that 1) loans held by banks on their own balance sheets had lower default rates than otherwise identical loans sold by banks to investors and 2) (in work with Taylor Begley, PhD '14, and Kuncheng Zheng, PhD '15) even with securitized loans, default rates were lower when the riskiest tranche was held by the lender rather than sold to investors. Collectively, the work done by Ross faculty and PhD alums showed that the ability to securitize mortgage loans undermined the incentives of lenders to the point that low-quality mortgage loans were made, essentially providing the dry timber that fueled the GFC.

The paper "CONWIP: a pull alternative to kanban" by Professor Wally Hopp and coauthors, published in The International Journal of Production Research in 1990, presents an innovative production control method known as Constant Work-In-Process. CONWIP represents a notable advance over the well-known Kanban approach of the Toyota Production System that outperforms Kanban under a wide range of settings, is more adaptable to variability, and, unlike Kanban, is suited to environments with a large number of products. The path-breaking analysis of this paper spurred a significant stream of research into the performance of pull production systems that continues to this day. CONWIP has also become a standard part of the operations lexicon and has seen widespread application in industrial settings. Finally, CONWIP was an essential building block of the science of manufacturing that Wally and others introduced as Factory Physics in subsequent work. 

The Personal Development Plan is a simple but impactful idea that has now been utilized by approximately 6,000 BBA alums and current students. At its core, the PDP is an Excel document that helps students plan the requirements to graduate, but its usage and value go far beyond just a requirement planning tool. In 2006, the BBA degree, which had for decades been a two-year degree program, was modified to a three-year structure with a small number of first-year preferred admits. Eight years later, in 2014, the BBA curriculum was modified from a 45 business credit requirement to 58 business credits. The changes to the curriculum meant that students had significantly more time, more flexibility, and more choices in how they progressed through the BBA degree. That flexibility increased even more as we moved to a four-year program in 2017. Advisors developed the PDP as a resource to help students make the most out of this expanded college experience.

In 2014, with the launch of the 58-credit BBA curriculum, a new core course was created, BA 200. As part of BA 200, PDP was introduced as a required component of the class and is now a co-curricular component of BA 100 and BA 102. Each year, the undergraduate advising team works with over 625 new BBA students (first-year students and transfers) so that each student develops an individualized plan for their life as a college student. Ensuring that they are planning requirements is an important part of this, but in developing their plan, students are asked to reflect on their goals for their time in college while developing their PDP. What skills and competencies do they hope to develop while they are here? Are there opportunities they want to take advantage of (study abroad, participation in programs through centers and institutes, minors or dual degrees, club leadership, etc.)? The PDP is a living document that travels with students throughout their four years and becomes a reference point for continued conversations and relationship-building with advisors until graduation. The PDP has had an impact on every single BBA student since the fall of 2014, helping to open their eyes to the rich opportunities at Michigan Ross and giving them a roadmap to their unique journey as a Ross BBA.

Since an article she published in the Iowa Law Review in 1995, Professor Dana Muir has worked in the field of fiduciary obligation, particularly as it relates to the investment of the almost $37 trillion in U.S. retirement assets, but also as it relates to a variety of other employee benefit plans. In her 1995 article, Muir explained that the courts' attempts to define fiduciary obligation using concepts from fourteenth-century trust law were misguided. Muir has subsequently addressed fiduciary concepts in the context of investment advice, the extent to which employers serve as fiduciaries of the plans the sponsor, and, most recently, in their application to the consideration of environmental, societal, and governance factors in the investment of retirement fund assets.

The Integrated Product Development course is a unique cross-disciplinary experiential course delivered jointly by Michigan Ross, the College of Engineering, and the Stamps School of Art and Design. The course requires teams of business, engineering, and art students to execute the full range of the product development and launch process, from early-stage ideation through design and fabrication to launch stage promotion, pricing, and inventory decisions. 

It has been continuously offered for more than 30 years and has been featured on CNN and in BusinessWeek, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Professor William Lovejoy originally designed this course, but it was subsequently taught by a series of dedicated professors drawn from the three units. It remains a course students remember and refer back to throughout their professional careers.

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.

The Carson Scholars Program at Michigan Ross is a signature feature of the Ross BBA Program and a result of the vision and generosity of David Carson, BBA '55. Carson, the former president of People's Savings Bank in Connecticut, was recognized by Forbes as one of the 500 most powerful people in the corporate United States. Based on his experiences throughout his career, Carson realized that future business leaders should understand how government works to develop effective corporate strategies for participating in the public policy arena. As a result, CSP enables Ross undergraduates to augment their on-campus learning with study in Washington, D.C., where they meet with elected officials, government experts, industry leaders, issue advocates, and lobbyists. Since its foundation in 2005, the program has enabled more than 1,000 alumni to learn about the public policy process from these experts.

With generous support from the Mitsui Life Insurance Company, Professor E. Han Kim helped to establish the Mitsui Life Financial Research Center in 1990. The center supports research in finance in a myriad of ways and functions as an active community of faculty, students, and visiting research scholars. Since its inception, the center has rapidly expanded its influence and reputation in supporting and disseminating academic research in financial economics. In 1994, a gift from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone allowed the center to offer even greater research support to Michigan Ross faculty. The center holds annual symposiums in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as in Tokyo, Japan, and provides research support for faculty and doctoral students through sponsoring weekly Mitsui Finance Seminars, NTT Fellowships, the Mitsui Distinguished Visiting Scholar program, weekly finance reading groups, and data acquisitions.