Explore the faculty research, thought leadership, and groundbreaking philosophies that established Michigan Ross as one of the world’s top business schools.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Following the decision of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization by the U.S. Supreme Court, abortion restrictions within the United States have proliferated, and it is reasonable to expect that access to abortion services will be even further reduced in the future. The work of Associate Professor Sarah Miller investigates the impact of abortion denial using new linkages between data from the Turnaway Study and administrative records in credit reports. The Turnaway Study was a path-breaking study from the University of California San Francisco that recruited women seeking abortions, some of whom had pregnancies that just exceeded the gestational age limit of the clinic they attended and were denied abortions, others who fell just below this limit and were able to receive the abortion they sought. Miller and her co-authors found that women denied an abortion and those who received an abortion were on similar trajectories before the denial, but those denied an abortion experienced a large spike in financial problems such as unpaid bills and public records (such as bankruptcies and liens). This spike in financial problems persisted for the full six-year follow-up period that the authors had access to. The results provide evidence counter to the narrative that abortion is exclusively harmful to women who receive one (because of, for example, the regret they may feel after receiving an abortion). Instead, it suggests that giving women control over the timing of their reproduction allows them greater financial stability and self-sufficiency.
Changes in health care structure following World War II brought the need for increased legislation, regulations, and court oversight to the industry. Professor Arthur Southwick of the Michigan Business School was a leader in developing these diverse sources into a coherent framework that enabled academics, healthcare leaders, and students to understand this emerging area of law.
According to Wharton Professor Arnold Rosoff, Southwick's book, The Law of Hospital and Health Care Administration, first published in 1978, "was a central fixture in the field's literature and the means by which countless numbers of hospital administrators learned about the laws that so significantly defined their field of practice." In this way, Southwick was a thought leader in developing healthcare law. In addition to his intellectual leadership in the healthcare field, Southwick served on the State Health Planning Advisory Council in Michigan and played a key role in founding what has become the 12,500-member American Health Law Association.
Michigan Ross has long been a pioneer in entrepreneurial education, introducing the nation's first course on entrepreneurship in 1927. However, in the early 1970s, Professor LaRue Hosmer played a pivotal role in championing entrepreneurship education at Ross. He developed and taught courses in small business management and a seminar on small business formation. He is considered the founder of the Michigan Entrepreneur Track and has also inspired present-day entrepreneurship faculty at Michigan Ross, including Professor Andy Lawlor. Lawlor was a student in Hosmer's entrepreneurial management course in 1973, and Hosmer has been an important mentor to Lawlor, helping to bridge the gap between business and teaching. Lawlor began guest lecturing under Hosmer's guidance in 1975 and assumed the teaching responsibilities for the entrepreneurship classes in 1981. Over the years, many successful companies have been born from Hosmer and Lawlor's teaching.
Established by Samuel Zell and Ann Lurie in 1999 as the first entrepreneurial studies program at the University of Michigan, the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies plays a vital role in developing the next generation of entrepreneurs and venture investors. The Institute offers various programs, competitions, and academic courses that give students the knowledge, skills, and motivation to develop a growth mindset and succeed as entrepreneurs.
Since its inception, the Institute has supported more than 9,100 entrepreneurs. It provides students with hands-on experience in entrepreneurial environments where they create, lead, and shape innovative ventures.
The Institute also supports venture investing and plays a key role in connecting entrepreneurs with venture capital and grant funding. This access to funding is crucial for entrepreneurs looking to start or scale their businesses and allows Ross students to act as real venture capitalists.
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.
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.
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.
In 2021, Assistant Professor Andreas Hagemann developed a new econometric methodology that addresses the complexities of clustered data to enhance the accuracy and reliability of empirical work in economics and related fields. Typical examples of clusters are firms, cities, or states. The central challenge is that units within clusters may influence one another or may be influenced by similar environmental factors in ways that cannot be observed. Empirical researchers know that neglecting to account for clusters can yield results where non-existent effects erroneously appear as highly significant. Hagemann's research agenda developed new tools to address this issue in challenging and empirically relevant scenarios. His work has had a substantial impact on econometric theory and empirical practice. For instance, the methodology he developed is now the standard option for clustering in the canonical implementation of quantile regression in the statistical programming language R.
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.