Previously, it was commonly believed that the media had little role to play in capital markets -- that they neither produced information nor disseminated information in a meaningful manner. Professor Greg Miller questioned this logic and set out to see if there was empirical evidence that would support such an assumption. 

Miller found that the business press acted as a corporate watchdog that was instrumental in uncovering financial misconduct. As such, the business press was no longer viewed as talking heads, but as investigative journalism which brought value to the market through the governance role it played. With the more recent introduction of social media, many believed that social media had no role to play in capital markets. A team of researchers from U-M, including Beth Blankespor, Miller, and Hal White, decided to take a novel approach and see if social media could improve capital market outcomes. 

Their work was the first to show that social media played an important role in disseminating corporate financial information. Their foundation of research was instrumental in corporate investor relation groups adopting social media to disseminate information to market participants.

Professor Jim Walsh was elected as the 65th president of the Academy of Management in 2006, making him only the second Michigan faculty member to lead the Academy. Walsh took stock of the approximately 16,000 members who lived in more than 100 countries at the time and noted that very few of them resided on the continent of Africa. Knowing that Africa, the cradle of civilization, is home to over a billion people and more than 1,000 universities and that the continent was poised for enormous population and economic growth, he wanted to bridge the gap and reach out to the teacher-scholars on the continent. Fully aware of the terrible history of colonization, he decided to simply create space for colleagues in Africa to meet their colleagues from the rest of the world. The first step in the process was to work with others to co-found the African Academy of Management. His continued work culminated in a 2013 AOM Africa Conference, in which approximately 300 colleagues from the world over journeyed to Johannesburg to share and imagine new research and teaching ideas. Since that time, the Africa Academy of Management has hosted a number of faculty development workshops, launched the Africa Journal of Management, and held conferences across the continent. In short, Africa-centered scholarship has burgeoned. Beyond that, the Ross School was just granted affiliate member status in the Association of African Business Schools. Professor Walsh wanted to be sure that we too are a part of the emerging scholarly conversations and evolving business practices on the continent.

In 1991, Professor Priscilla Rodgers designed an assessment to help the Michigan Business School evaluate MBA students' written communication skills, which was used for course placement. When the GMAT added an Analytical Writing Assessment in 1994, Rodgers conducted research that showed the AWA did not accurately assess management communication and that the assessment criteria and methodology used at the business school were far more meaningful. Rodgers and her team developed five six-point scales that quantified the competencies that MBA students need to be effective writers. In 2017, the business communication area at Michigan Ross moved to an assessment of MBA students' management communication, which included speaking as well as writing, and allowed students to choose a non-credit path toward satisfying the communication requirement. Andrea Morrow, lecturer and director of writing programs, developed a framework based on Rodgers' work called the Ross Management Communication Competencies Framework. As part of the new assessment process, full-time, global, and online MBA students learn about management communication and are assessed using Morrow's framework. If their results show they are low in any of the five competency areas, they can opt to complete targeted work on Canvas, or they can opt to take a business communication class. No other business school has a program like this.

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.

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.

Michigan Business School Professor and Erb Institute Faculty Director,Tom Gladwin, pioneered the field of business sustainability with his concept of a "science of sustainable enterprise." It was one of the first scholarly frameworks to bring together the social, environmental, economic, and organizational aspects of competitive companies that likewise are managed to explicitly create value for society. With groundbreaking publications like "Shifting Paradigms for Sustainable Development: Implications for Management Theory and Research" and "Beyond Eco-Efficiency: Towards Socially Sustainable Business" in the 1990s, Gladwin dramatically expanded the scope of traditional management education and business leadership. Throughout his career, and his long-time partnership with the Prince of Wales's Business & the Environment Programme, Gladwin influenced hundreds of CEOs and other top corporate leaders to think deeply about, and take action on, the threat and the opportunity of sustainable business. 

Professor Dudley Maynard Phelps, who was part of the Michigan Business School faculty from 1924-67, studied and wrote about the distinct marketing environments and challenges in markets as diverse as Latin America, Western Europe, and the former Soviet Union, including work for the U.S. State Department. He received recognition for this work from the International Marketing Institute and was president of the American Marketing Association. In the 1980s, Professor Vern Terpstra continued this work and authored the most widely used text on international marketing and other books on the cultural environment of international business, and also published highly impactful research on country-of-origin effects with his PhD student C. Min Han. Terpstra was president of the Academy of International Business in 1970 and was invited to teach at several universities.

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.

In 2004, Ross finance Professors M.P. Narayanan and Nejat Seyhun's research revealed that thousands of corporate executives were systematically backdating their executive option awards to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra compensation illegally.  The authors’ research proved difficult to publish, however. Referees and editors refused publication because the authors were “accusing the captains of American industry of outright fraud." Eventually, following dozens of press appearances between 2004 and 2006, the attitudes changed.  Soon afterward, the floodgates of civil and criminal lawsuits opened, following a Wall Street Journal story truly accusing the top executives of outright fraud. Finally, one editor relented in 2008 and the research was published as is. Subsequent investigations indeed found that many executives, in collusion with the board of directors as well as the company human resources executives, went so far as to make up fake meeting dates and fake meeting minutes and fraudulently altered corporate documents to perpetuate their fraud.  Finally, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission changed the option award rules to end option-award backdating. Narayanan and Seyhun's research underlines the importance of good corporate governance policies in containing executives’ worst instincts and stopping them from preying on their own shareholders.

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.

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.

Under the leadership of Marian Krzyzowski, Michigan Ross launched the Domestic Corps in 1992 with financial support from the United States Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. The Domestic Corps provided leadership development and action-based learning opportunities for Ross students while providing critical business assistance to the non-profit community in the United States. For 15 years, the Domestic Corps placed hundreds of students in more than 100 non-profit organizations nationwide, where they worked on projects in economically distressed and culturally diverse communities. That included Native American communities, inner city community-based organizations, and rural non-profits. The Domestic Corps also partnered with the University of Michigan's Neighborhood AmeriCorps Program to place MBA interns in  20 more than Detroit community-based organizations. The Domestic Corps projects helped raise millions of dollars, won national awards for community and economic development, and transformed numerous organizations while simultaneously providing students with management experience in challenging contexts and instilling a sense of corporate responsibility and social justice.

From 2000 to 2005, Professors C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan co-authored several papers on concepts related to how the emergence of digital technologies was transforming business models. From 2005 to 2008, they co-authored the book New Age of Innovation, which introduced the concept of N=1;R=G business model framework. The basic argument was that given the new capabilities emerging from digital technologies, the structure of business models was in the midst of a transformation across industries. They claimed that business models will shift from mass production of products or services to businesses co-creating personalized experiences for one customer at a time. They called this N=1 business model, i.e., businesses will operate on a sample size (N) of one. They argued that to orchestrate this personalized experience for one customer at a time, businesses will not own all resources but will connect with resource partners across the globe (Resources=Global or R=G), and these partners could be big organizations, small businesses, entrepreneurs, or even individuals. They called this business model N=1;R=G. They argued that digital technology was at the center of enabling these capabilities, and no industry will be immune to this change. They presented more than 80 examples in the book. The rest of the book was on the capabilities companies needed to build inside their organizations to compete as an N=1 business. Their primary thesis identified the significant role of software in orchestrating the personalized N=1 experience in an ecosystem of partners and the criticality of the right capabilities in the information architecture and social architecture of companies to thrive in this competition of N=1;R=G ecosystem business models.

Former Michigan Ross Professor Gautam Ahuja's "Collaboration Networks, Structural Holes, and Innovation: A Longitudinal Study" marked a significant turn in the way scholars view the impact of inter-organizational networks on innovation. Until this point, the common perception was more or less linear: the more connections a firm has, the better it is for innovation. However, Ahuja's research added a layer of complexity by considering indirect ties and structural holes in a firm's network. The results of Ahuja's study challenged existing theories at the time and opened up an entirely new area of research. Now, scholars must consider not only the quantity of a firm's connections but also their quality and structure and how these elements influence innovation. This nuanced understanding helped expand the study of inter-organizational networks, underlining how the firms' positions within such networks can dictate their innovation output. This paper is credited with kickstarting a whole new area of research -- inter-organizational networks and innovation -- which focuses not just on the number of connections a firm has but the whole structure of its network and how it impacts its ability to innovate.

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.

The late 1990s ushered in a revolutionary view across the social sciences centered around the power and importance of studying strengths, better understanding how people thrive, and how systems seize opportunities for creating excellence. Michigan Ross led the way in advancing this fundamental research shift in the field of management and organizations, with many scholars publishing seminal research in the field. In 2002, three faculty members, Jane Dutton, Bob Quinn, and Kim Cameron, founded the Center for Positive Organizations to encourage rigor in this growing field of research and to serve as a home for a large network of scholars interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. As the field has grown over the years, Positive Organizational Scholarship has influenced how management is taught and practiced. CPO at Michigan Ross is a leader in helping teachers and students tap into this body of evidence and learn about this research through innovative courses and developmental learning programs. Those tools include the "Reciprocity Ring", a dynamic group exercise that applies the “pay-it-forward” principle while creating high-quality connections, and the "Reflected Best Self Exercise", which helps you see who you are at your best to engage you to live and work from that powerful place daily.