Professor Kenneth Lieberthal was a pioneer in the practice of business school professors contributing their knowledge in public service to society. Lieberthal served as the senior director for Asia for the U.S. National Security Council during the years 1998-2000. 

During that same time, Lieberthal was also special assistant to President Clinton for National Security Affairs. His core academic research findings included a seminal analysis of China's bureaucratic system, which featured a nuanced and careful delineation of the fragmented nature of China's political system in the late 20th century. 

Lieberthal's research was able to explain why China, during that era, had weak policy implementation at times because of the fragmentation in its bureaucratic system. He was known for introducing U.S. policymakers to a nuanced and careful understanding of the Chinese governmental system and how it functions.

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.

In 2007, Professor Maxim Sytch published a paper titled "Joint Dependence and Embeddedness: Reshaping Interorganizational Relationships and Exchange Dynamics." In this work, Sytch and his coauthor identify how joint dependence can shape relational embeddedness in inter-organizational relationships. Joint dependence stimulates relational closeness, collaborative action, and fine-grained information exchange between partners. These dynamics improve the performance of inter-organizational exchanges and reduce uncertainty within the relationship. Additionally, they reshape the exchange logic associated with interdependence, moving from an emphasis on power and leverage to a focus on relational embeddedness and mutual collaboration. This work has served as a potent counter to previous organizational and economic theories that associated interdependence with power, leverage, and mutual holdup. However, Sytch demonstrated that joint dependence can foster stronger bonds between exchange partners, leading to more effective exchanges without the looming threat of retaliation. Furthermore, the concept of joint dependence underscores that reducing relational uncertainty does not necessarily require less dependence on that partner. On the contrary, a mutual increase in dependence can foster relational closeness within the exchange, reducing opportunism, enhancing collaboration, and improving the performance of exchange relationships.

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.

Professor Gautam Kaul and two former PhD students, in their seminal 1994 study titled, "Transactions, Volume, and Volatility" convincingly argued and verified empirically that it is the occurrence of a trade in a certain direction rather than its dollar value (or volume) that has the greatest effect on prices, hence the greatest relevance when assessing the liquidity of the market where that trade took place. A trade sign is determined by the buyer or seller's information, while market conditions determine trade amount and price. This is a simple yet extremely powerful notion that was originally predicated in theory but had no empirical support before their 1994 study. The publication of this study opened the door to the accurate measurement and needed assessment of market liquidity. These days, the approach they recommended is widespread in its use.

The fields of social movements and organizations had very little overlap until Professors Jerry Davis and Mayer Zald convened a pair of conferences at Michigan Ross in 2001 and 2002 that brought together top scholars from both domains and forged research collaborations that yielded a 2005 Cambridge University Press volume and a 2008 special issue of Administrative Science Quarterly. Zald had previously published a piece on the topic in 1977, as had Davis in 1994. Today, this is a widely recognized and fruitful research domain that arose just in time to explain the increasingly prevalent interplay between corporations and social movements, including boycotts, corporate political activism, and employee social movements.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the public K-12 education system has faced significantly high teacher turnover and poor retention rates. Teachers have faced increasing pressure to achieve academic success while challenged with growing class sizes, reduced funding, and learning loss from the pandemic. This problem has been incredibly difficult to correct, and public school districts across the country have not been able to address it cost effectively.

In their paper, “Stopping the Revolving Door: An Empirical and Textual Study of Crowdfunding and Teacher Turnover,” Professors Samantha Keppler, Jun Li, and Andrew Wu conducted a study of data from the largest teacher crowdfunding site, DonorsChoose, to study the effect of crowdfunded projects on teacher retention. The team found that teachers are less likely to leave their schools and the state public school system when their projects are funded. Assessing teachers’ project request essays, they identified that teachers who received funding for unique projects or requested resources to improve their classroom environment had higher retention rates.

Their paper is the first to identify the effect of crowdfunding on teacher retention. It provides initial, strong evidence that the effect is positive, showing that teachers funded on DonorsChoose are 1.6 percentage points (pp) less likely to leave their schools and 1.9 pp less likely to leave the teaching profession — a 14% and 41% reduction versus baseline turnover and attrition rates, respectively.

Due to the demonstrated impact of teacher-driven crowdfunded projects, DonorsChoose has partnered with eight states to spend COVID-19 education relief funding on teacher crowdfunding projects. To date, these partnerships have funded over $100 million of teacher projects from over 100,000 teachers, impacting over 10 million students.

The public corporation in America is vanishing, and more people, from low-income earners to professionals, are doing their work in the so-called “gig economy.” The work of Professors Jerry Davis and Sue Ashford put these two issues on the research agenda of scholarly colleagues. Davis documents the first idea in his book, The Vanishing American Corporation (2016). Although some scholars have suggested that over-regulation might account for this surprising trend, he argues that a more fundamental shift in the economy, enabled by information and communication technologies, was ultimately responsible. By making it cheaper to "buy" rather than "make" inputs (from capital and labor to supplies, manufacturing, and distribution), information and communication technologies have made the parts of an enterprise like a pile of Legos, ready to assemble into a business, scale, and disassemble. This idea explains Nikefication, Uberization, Amazon, and other recent trends in the organization of the U.S. economy, as well as why the same technologies are used differently in different countries, resulting in very different corporate structures. If what Davis says is true, then fewer people will be working in large public corporation settings going forward. This shift may account for the growth in people working independently, some using technologically mediated apps to find and conduct work. Ashford puts the gig economy and gig workers on the agenda of people wanting to understand individuals at work. Her qualitative and quantitative studies identify the challenges faced by those working independently and what they can do to survive and thrive. Challenges include maintaining one’s identity, keeping sufficient income flowing in, staying organized, finding and maintaining work connections, and figuring out how to make working in this manner work over the long run. This research tests a variety of interventions and solicits ideas from individuals working in this manner regarding strategies that make this kind of work-life viable and enlivening.

Beginning from seminal efforts by Brian Talbot at the Michigan Business School in the early 1990s, the Tauber Institute for Global Operations was designed to bring business and engineering students together for a world-class education in operations. Students would take classes in both business and engineering and complete team projects with companies. The projects were scoped to incorporate both business and engineering content, addressing important problems that had a VP-level champion at the sponsoring company. The institute was innovative by offering additional training to students beyond operations: leadership training, communications training, and providing students the opportunity to organize conferences, etc. In addition to its impact on students and companies, the Institute has for years served as an important mechanism fueling the technology and operations faculty's relevant, problem-driven research by putting them in touch with practitioners at leading companies around the world. Since its foundation, more than 1,500 graduates have completed the program as Tauber Fellows, there have been 720 summer projects executed at 145 companies, and the Institute was honored in 2012 with the prestigious UPS George D. Smith Prize from INFORMS.

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.

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.

Professor David Brophy brought the study of small businesses and private financial markets (now known as alternative, in contrast to publicly traded markets) to Michigan Ross and the state of Michigan before it was recognized as a legitimate area of study at top research universities. This process started in the mid-to-late seventies, and Brophy relentlessly created awareness in Michigan and educated students interested in this space. For over fifty decades, until his recent retirement, Brophy designed and taught all Michigan Ross venture capital and private equity courses.

Professor Karl Weick was an iconic founder of the field of organizational behavior. Starting with his seminal book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, which was published in 1969, Weick's ideas had enormous influence, shaping organizational scholarship over the next decades and to this day. He focused on the processes of organizing rather than on organizations per se, suggesting that the insights into those processes give us important leverage to both understand and affect life in organizations. In his book, he introduced the seminal concept of "sense-making," which he defined as "the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing." Weick's ongoing research focused on how individuals engaged in making meaning and how that meaning-making affected important outcomes in organizations. His book has been cited more than 35,000 times, and his other work on the topic has been cited more than 13,000 times. His pioneering work has instilled a highly influential perspective on the people attempting the organizing work that goes into organizations.

"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."

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. 

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."