In 1998, Professor David Hirshleifer of the Michigan Business School, and two co-authors, published a paper titled "Investor Psychology and Security Market Under- and Overreactions." This paper has been widely recognized as the first explanation of the seemingly contradictory behavior in asset prices (under- and overreactions to different news) based on two well documented behavioral biases. The biases outlined in the paper are overconfidence (regarding the precision of one's private information) and biased self-attribution. The former leads to well documented evidence of long-term overreaction (price reversals), while the latter causes underreaction (momentum) in the medium term. This paper was the first widely recognized paper in finance based on departures from rational behavior and provided a compelling explanation for seemingly anomalous behavior in asset prices.

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.

Sensory marketing is a relatively new and growing field of marketing that Professor Aradhna Krishna pioneered in the early 2000s. Krishna saw that there were disparate fields of study on senses, but there was no cohesion between these fields. She brought all these sub-fields together under the umbrella of sensory marketing and organized the first conference on it in 2008. She then wrote two books and dozens of scholarly articles on the subject to make the field grow. And the field did grow both in academia and in practice -- enough for Harvard Business Review to do a lead Ideawatch article on it featuring Krishna as the world's foremost expert on the topic. Krishna has defined "sensory marketing" as marketing that engages the consumers' senses and affects their perception, judgment, and behavior. Krishna continues to publish important, scholarly articles on the topic. She also started the Sensory Marketing Lab at Michigan Ross, which attracts PhD students and post-docs from around the world.

William Davidson (1922-2009) was a successful global business leader and alum of the University of Michigan. He understood the value of the private sector to empower people around the world. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Davidson recognized the value of educating and empowering economic decision-makers in formerly centralized economies with the tools of commercial success. Davidson partnered with U-M to create a unique institute providing consulting and training services to nonprofits, corporations and small businesses in emerging markets with the goals of economic growth and social progress. Since 1992, the William Davidson Institute (WDI) has served as a platform to introduce students to the challenges and opportunities facing firms in low- and middle-income countries. 

Over its history, the Institute has supported U-M student teams, totaling more than 1,800 students, who collaborate with business and nonprofit partners to provide analysis and develop solutions built upon the foundation of basic business principles. To ensure ongoing access to current and relevant business education, WDI Publishing also produces and distributes high-quality, cutting-edge business cases and other teaching materials, with more than 700 cases in its collection, reaching approximately 800 universities and institutions globally. 

The Institute is also home to NextBillion.net, an online platform for discussing business models and innovations that address development challenges in low- and middle-income countries. The platform reaches more than 25,000 readers a month.

Professor Joel Slemrod has worked on an agenda to broaden the scope of tax analysis to address several issues that standard economics models of taxation ignore. He has written several articles analyzing and addressing the blind spots of standard economics models and has co-authored a book titled Tax Systems, which outlines the implications of these blind spots. The influence of his work is demonstrated by the recent policy attention given to tax enforcement in the United States and other countries, such as an increase in funding appropriated to the IRS to reduce evasion of high-income individuals and corporations, as well as innovative administrative policy developments through the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and the OECD Pillars One and Two, which subjects a group of large multinational companies to a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. Slemrod's work has received over 35,000 citations, numerous awards and accolades, and a No. 1 ranking among public finance economists per the Research Papers In Economics site.

In the article "The Core Competence of the Corporation," Professor C. K. Prahalad and his collaborator Gary Hamel introduced a groundbreaking idea about how companies succeed. 

They presented the idea that rather than just looking at the products they sell, companies should identify and nurture their core competencies -- the unique abilities and strengths that make them stand out. Those competencies are born from collective experience and knowledge in the company and combine different skills and technologies. Additionally, core competencies are not easy for competitors to copy, therefore giving companies a lasting edge in the market. 

In their article, Prahalad and Hamel cautioned companies not to get overly wrapped up in their current products, which might change with time. They advised that instead, companies should focus on understanding and enhancing their deep-rooted strengths as they pave the way for future innovations and market leadership. By recognizing and harnessing core competencies, companies can venture into new markets, innovate, and stay ahead of the competition. In simple terms, companies should know and recognize what they are genuinely good at and use that to shape their future.

The Dare to Dream grant program is an initiative by the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. It provides funding to U-M students interested in exploring and pursuing entrepreneurial ventures. 

The student grant program offers three different tracks targeted toward early-stage students looking to develop a business concept to integrate entrepreneurship into their academic studies, students who have already developed a business concept and are seeking to validate and assess the feasibility of their idea, and students who are ready to launch their ventures.

In a paper published as a lead article in the Journal of Finance in 1990, Professor Nejat Seyhun investigated whether informed investors stabilize and correct mistakes in security prices by buying undervalued assets and selling overvalued assets or destabilize security prices by jumping into already overpriced securities to create bigger bubbles and mis-valuations first, only to exploit them later. Seyhun's investigation centered on the stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market crashed by 22% in one day. He found that top corporate insiders bought undervalued stocks and sold overvalued stocks in record quantities immediately following the crash. Hence, informed insiders were stabilizing security prices and not destabilizing them further. This finding provides comfort that the stock market will be self-policing and self-correcting and justifies the current regulatory system, which assumes that more information is beneficial by requiring timely, accurate, and full dissemination of information from all parties involved. Seyhun was among the first to explore various aspects of reported insider trading and its effects on share prices and shareholder wealth.

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. 

In 2018, Professor Tom Lyon led a team of scholars who published a groundbreaking article about corporate political responsibility titled “CSR Needs CPR” in the California Management Review. The article argued that corporate social responsibility was an insufficient measure of corporate contribution to society and that stakeholders who care about CSR should also pay attention to corporate political responsibility. In 2019, Elizabeth Doty, adjunct faculty at Presidio Graduate School, contacted the Erb Institute at the University of Michigan and suggested turning the article into an industry roundtable dedicated to working with a select group of influential business leaders and their companies to bring to life the core precept of the article – the need to better align companies’ political spending and lobbying with their commitments to values, purpose, sustainability, and stakeholders. Thus, the Erb Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce was founded in 2020. Lyon and Doty have developed the taskforce into a nationally recognized forum with the goal of making CPR a new norm for business. The taskforce operates under Chatham House Rule and has 20 members from some of the most recognized brands in the United States who share best practices and address CPR challenges. In 2023, the taskforce released the non-partisan Erb Principles for Corporate Political Responsibility, with five major companies as inaugural signatories. Looking ahead, the taskforce will continue building its integrated framework and engage more companies in applying the Erb Principles. Lyon continues his work in this space with his recently published volume Corporate Political Responsibility.

"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."

The Michigan Business Challenge is a prestigious business plan competition hosted by the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. It allows U-M students to showcase their entrepreneurial ideas, receive feedback from experienced judges, and compete for over $100,000 in cash prizes to support their ventures. 

The Michigan Business Challenge was established in 1984 at Michigan Ross and has since become one of the region's most impactful and well-known startup competitions. Over the years, the MBC has supported numerous successful startups, generated millions of dollars in funding, and helped launch successful entrepreneurial careers for U-M students and alumni. The MBC is open to various stages of business concepts, from early-stage ideas to established businesses. 

The competition consists of three tracks that cater to specific industry sectors, including the Seigle Impact Track for social ventures, the Invention Track for ventures that have intellectual property at the core of their high-tech venture, and the Innovation Track for growing startups. These tracks provide tailored resources, networking opportunities, and funding for participants. Notable entrepreneurial ventures that have come through the MBC include Morning Brew, Xoran Technologies, AMBIQ Micro, Elevate K-12, and many more.

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.

In 2002, Professor C.K. Prahalad of the Michigan Ross Business School and professor Stuart L. Hart of the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School published the iconic article "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" in Strategy+Business. The article suggested that "low-income markets present a prodigious opportunity for the world's wealthiest companies - to seek their fortunes and bring prosperity to the aspiring poor." Prahalad published a book with the same title five years before he passed in 2010. The article and book, with additional research and publications by Prahalad, Hart, Michigan Ross Professor Ted London, and others spawned a new business strategy for human development that has transformed into a social movement around the world known as Base of the Pyramid. The movement now includes transnationals, non-profits, social entrepreneurs, grassroots development organizations, international aid agencies, and many consulting firms dedicated to BoP strategy and implementation.

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.

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.