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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The research of Assistant Professor Eric Zou began with the observation that regulatory monitoring of pollution is often spatially sparse, temporally intermittent, or even nonexistent in developing-country settings. In a pair of papers titled "Unwatched Pollution: The Effect of Intermittent Monitoring on Air Quality" and "What's Missing in Environmental (Self-)Monitoring: Evidence from Strategic Shutdown of Pollution Monitors," Zou and his co-authors studied the strategic interaction between pollution monitoring and air quality. 

These two papers demonstrate that intermittency in regulatory monitoring causally affects pollution outcomes and vice versa -- high pollution can induce selective monitoring. The evidence highlights a general principle-agent challenge of environmental federalism: local agencies are in charge of self-monitoring and enforcing federal environmental standards. 

At the same time, these local agencies bear the regulatory penalties if their own data suggest that violations occurred. In a third paper titled "From Fog to Smog: The Value of Pollution Information," Zou and his co-authors found that pollution information disclosure triggered a dramatic change in public awareness of pollution issues, which in turn translated to increased avoidance behavior among members of the public and improved health. 

This paper is among the first to document social, behavioral, and health changes when a highly polluted country without publicly available pollution information transitions to a new regime that makes it possible to openly discuss pollution issues and to find and use pollution information in real time.

Professor C.K. Prahalad was the major pioneer and advocate of the 'bottom of the pyramid' proposition that selling to the poor can simultaneously be profitable and help eradicate poverty. While appealing, the BOP proposition is also controversial. Professor Aneel Karnani was an early and prominent critic of the BOP proposition. In his 2007 article "The Mirage of Marketing to the Bottom of the Pyramid" and his 2011 book Fighting Poverty Together: Rethinking Strategies for Business, Governments, and Civil Society to Reduce Poverty, he argues for an alternative perspective. Rather than viewing the poor primarily as consumers, it is better to focus on the poor as producers and to emphasize buying from the poor. Both the private sector and government have a critical role to play in alleviating poverty. The best way to alleviate poverty is to raise the real income of the poor by providing them appropriate employment opportunities. The private sector is the best engine of job creation. The government should facilitate the creation and growth of private enterprises in labor-intensive sectors of the economy. The government should also fulfill its traditional, accepted functions of providing adequate access to public services, such as education, public health, drinkable water, sanitation, security, and infrastructure.

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. 

The 1996 book Competing for the Future by the late Professor C.K. Prahalad and his colleague, Gary Hamel from the London Business School, was unique in that it tied together several of Hamel and Prahalad's leading ideas into book format. The book introduces the concept of "core competencies," which emphasizes that organizations should focus on leveraging their inherent strengths and unique capabilities, and "strategic intent," which focuses on setting an ambitious, long-run vision for a firm's future. This emphasis on future thinking was a particularly notable aspect of the book. In general, the book advocated for a proactive approach to strategy where businesses actively envision and shape the trajectory of their respective industries instead of merely reacting to existing competitors and market dynamics in the short run. This emphasis on dynamics -- in particular, envisioning the future and then mobilizing strategy to compete in shaping it -- had important managerial implications for business thinking in the 1990s.  It suggested that companies needed to transition from a short-term, reactive mindset to a more forward-thinking, visionary stance; this would allow companies not just to survive but dominate in future market landscapes. Overall, this book had a notable impact on business practice; Time Magazine named it one of "The 25 Most Influential Business Management Books."

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.

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.

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.