Explore the faculty research, thought leadership, and groundbreaking philosophies that established Michigan Ross as one of the world’s top business schools.
![Emotional Advertising](/themes/custom/ross_theme/images/person.png)
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.
![Social venture fund](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/social-venture_0.jpg?itok=lYEI6Y0a)
Four student-run venture funds are currently operating at Michigan Ross, more than any other business school. Collectively, these funds manage a portfolio worth more than $10 million. These funds help students learn about investing early-stage capital by making real deals with real companies and real money. The concept of student-run venture funds has been adopted by universities around the world.
![Paolo Pasquariello](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/Paolo%20Pasquariello.jpeg?itok=XhuMCeBK)
Expanding on his dissertation thesis, completed in 2003, Professor Paolo Pasquariello's powerful insight (published in 2007) demonstrates that financial contagion (the spread of a shock from one financial market to many) could occur due to the simple, and highly plausible, heterogeneous private information of speculators about fundamentals. Financial contagion is an increasingly common phenomenon of global concern, especially during financial crises. Importantly, Pasquariello's theoretical multi-market setting rules out all the more complicated explanations of contagion --- usual suspects such as correlated information and/or liquidity and portfolio rebalancing --- while linking it to some of the main features of globalization, the expansion of and access to international financial markets.
![Ravi Anupindi](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/Ravi%20Anupindi.jpeg?itok=RJq-9FC_)
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.
![Erb Institute logo](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/erb-logo_0.png?itok=UPTuf-In)
In the early 1990s, Professor Garry Brewer became dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and the Environment. He approached Dean Joe White of the Michigan Business School with the concept of a dual-degree program to prepare future business leaders with an integrated education in both earth and management sciences. The concept took shape first in 1993 in the form of a graduate dual-degree program (originally called the Corporate Environmental Management Program) under the leadership of Professor Stuart Hart and then the Erb Institute after a generous grant from Fred and Barbara Erb in 1996 and a series of additional donations from other visionary donors. The dual-degree program was then incorporated into the Erb Institute and bolstered by the scholarly research of three newly endowed professorships. Nearly 30 years later, the Erb Institute has expanded dramatically to become a full-fledged, endowed institute with three chaired professors, an undergraduate Erb Fellows Program, more than 200 graduate and undergraduate students, and more than 750 alumni across 17 countries. In addition, the institute has an active agenda of scholarly and applied research and works to facilitate business engagement through business roundtables and global conference partnerships. Today, the Erb Institute is generally recognized as the leading business sustainability institute for research, teaching, and business engagement.
![Aradhna Krishna](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/aradhna-krishna.jpg?itok=xnsTrkuU)
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.
![Michigan Ross logo](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/mross-logo-bug_1.png?itok=mpxNGF2_)
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.
![New Age of Innovation](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/new-age.jpg?itok=nCRxEZOw)
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.
![Jeremy Kress](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/jeremy-kress.jpg?itok=N6t74ONv)
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.
![Bill Lovejoy](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/Bill%20Lovejoy.jpeg?itok=JWqbwpAw)
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.
![Student studying in wintergarden](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/prep-initiative.png?itok=SwJq03ot)
The Preparation Initiative was created by Professor Emeritus Frank Yates in 2005. Yates was a champion of diversity in higher education and believed all students should have access to Michigan Ross, regardless of their preparation. The Preparation Initiative is a thriving community designed to foster the excellence and success of undergraduate business students from economically distressed backgrounds or from racial or ethnic groups historically underrepresented in business leadership. Since its inception, the Preparation Initiative has supported hundreds of students in their pursuit of a business education and now also offers mentoring opportunities for alums of the program.
![wally-hopp](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/wally-hopp.jpeg?itok=_ubZLYVJ)
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.
![Journal of Public Policy and Marketing](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/journal_of_public_policy_marketing_logo.jpeg?itok=CJQC2Z_s)
The inception of the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing dates back to 1982 when it was founded by Tom Kinnear, a prominent faculty member from the Michigan Business School. Its initial name was Journal of Marketing and Public Policy. However, due to concerns raised by the American Marketing Association about potential confusion with the Journal of Marketing, it officially adopted its current name in 1983. The primary motivation behind the journal's creation was the growing interest among marketing academics in public policy during that era. During the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a growing interest in issues concerning the intersection of public policy and marketing. This interest encompassed various aspects, including advocacy for children's rights, as well as concerns related to other vulnerable groups such as the elderly, ethnic communities, and those with low income; the environmental impact of consumption and the emergence of what is now termed the "green consumer"; the adoption of energy-efficient practices by consumers following significant increases in gasoline, electric, and natural gas prices; evolving product liability doctrines that were becoming more lenient in terms of protective measures; food labeling and nutritional aspects; new consumer protection laws and measures. It is noteworthy that many of these trends are still relevant today, albeit with some shifts in emphasis, such as the increased focus on climate change.
![Michigan Ross logo](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/mross-logo-bug_3.png?itok=77yYBLkl)
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.
![Good business lab logo](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/good_business_lab_logo.jpeg?itok=HNsj6Si2)
Associate Professor Anant Nyshadham co-founded and co-directs the Good Business Lab, a labor research and innovation lab whose work to identify workplace tools and interventions to deliver both impact to workers and returns to employers has quickly expanded across four continents over the last decade. Designed and tested through rigorous randomized controlled trials in real-world workplaces, GBL has developed several tools for rapid and broad scale. GBL's worker voice tool, Inache, has been proven to improve worker retention, reduce absenteeism, and increase worker productivity in manufacturing settings. Similarly, the tool Pratibha is a tablet-based screening and training tool for frontline supervisors that measures and addresses soft skill deficiencies and has been proven to improve the retention of supervisors and dramatically and sustainably raise the productivity of workers in factories. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded GBL a multi-million dollar grant to scale these tools to more than a million workers in the next two years.
![Co-Creation Paradigm book cover](/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/images/impact_ideas/co-creation-paradigm.jpg?itok=8erxwoPM)
"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."