The Carson Scholars Program at Michigan Ross is a signature feature of the Ross BBA Program and a result of the vision and generosity of David Carson, BBA '55. Carson, the former president of People's Savings Bank in Connecticut, was recognized by Forbes as one of the 500 most powerful people in the corporate United States. Based on his experiences throughout his career, Carson realized that future business leaders should understand how government works to develop effective corporate strategies for participating in the public policy arena. As a result, CSP enables Ross undergraduates to augment their on-campus learning with study in Washington, D.C., where they meet with elected officials, government experts, industry leaders, issue advocates, and lobbyists. Since its foundation in 2005, the program has enabled more than 1,000 alumni to learn about the public policy process from these experts.

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.

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.

In 2018, Professor Tom Lyon led a team of scholars who published a groundbreaking article about corporate political responsibility titled “CSR Needs CPR” in the California Management Review. The article argued that corporate social responsibility was an insufficient measure of corporate contribution to society and that stakeholders who care about CSR should also pay attention to corporate political responsibility. In 2019, Elizabeth Doty, adjunct faculty at Presidio Graduate School, contacted the Erb Institute at the University of Michigan and suggested turning the article into an industry roundtable dedicated to working with a select group of influential business leaders and their companies to bring to life the core precept of the article – the need to better align companies’ political spending and lobbying with their commitments to values, purpose, sustainability, and stakeholders. Thus, the Erb Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce was founded in 2020. Lyon and Doty have developed the taskforce into a nationally recognized forum with the goal of making CPR a new norm for business. The taskforce operates under Chatham House Rule and has 20 members from some of the most recognized brands in the United States who share best practices and address CPR challenges. In 2023, the taskforce released the non-partisan Erb Principles for Corporate Political Responsibility, with five major companies as inaugural signatories. Looking ahead, the taskforce will continue building its integrated framework and engage more companies in applying the Erb Principles. Lyon continues his work in this space with his recently published volume Corporate Political Responsibility.

Professor Emerita Valerie Suslow and Adjunct Professor Margaret Levenstein have pursued a collaborative research agenda on the economics of cooperative behavior among firms, with a specific focus on cartels. Agreements between competing firms to reduce the intensity of competition can include actions such as price fixing, allocating geographic markets, allocating customers, and bid-rigging at auctions. Historically, such cooperative behavior was legal throughout the world but illegal in the United States under the Sherman Act of 1890. 

The U.S. National Industrial Recovery Act of the early 1930s suspended price-fixing antitrust laws in certain circumstances. In the mid-1990s, after many decades of inattention, it became clear to competition policy enforcers that cartel activity was rampant and was likely causing substantial consumer harm. This spurred new leniency and amnesty policy tools to become available to firms. In their highly cited article "What Determines Cartel Success?" Levenstein and Suslow make the case that while cartels may break up due to cheating on the agreement, the more insurmountable problems are entry and adjustments in the face of changing economic conditions. "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Determinants of Cartel Duration" shows that cartels that turn to price wars to punish cheaters are not stable. Highly stable cartels draw upon a vast toolkit of mechanisms to enhance their stability and, therefore, their duration and economic harm. 

Levenstein and Suslow's work has been cited in policy reports by organizations around the world, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization. They continue to explore hidden or overlooked sources of harm to consumers that may result from cartel activity, most recently turning their attention to the role played by vertical relationships between firms engaged in horizontal collusion, as well as how collusion may be facilitated by the use of a price index in long-term contracts.

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.

William Davidson (1922-2009) was a successful global business leader and alum of the University of Michigan. He understood the value of the private sector to empower people around the world. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Davidson recognized the value of educating and empowering economic decision-makers in formerly centralized economies with the tools of commercial success. Davidson partnered with U-M to create a unique institute providing consulting and training services to nonprofits, corporations and small businesses in emerging markets with the goals of economic growth and social progress. Since 1992, the William Davidson Institute (WDI) has served as a platform to introduce students to the challenges and opportunities facing firms in low- and middle-income countries. 

Over its history, the Institute has supported U-M student teams, totaling more than 1,800 students, who collaborate with business and nonprofit partners to provide analysis and develop solutions built upon the foundation of basic business principles. To ensure ongoing access to current and relevant business education, WDI Publishing also produces and distributes high-quality, cutting-edge business cases and other teaching materials, with more than 700 cases in its collection, reaching approximately 800 universities and institutions globally. 

The Institute is also home to NextBillion.net, an online platform for discussing business models and innovations that address development challenges in low- and middle-income countries. The platform reaches more than 25,000 readers a month.

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.

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. 

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.

Professor Gretchen Spreitzer received her PhD from Michigan Ross in 1992. Her work on empowerment, stemming from her Michigan Ross dissertation, has set the foundation for a new understanding of the employee experience. Instead of capital that organizations needed to control, empowerment brought forth the idea that employees thrive when they are given the freedom and autonomy to do their work autonomously. This pioneering work ushered in a new era of research and a fundamental shift in how organizations view their relationship with employees.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The marketing faculty at the University of Michigan has, over the decades, made several foundational contributions to the area of consumer behavior. Professor Joseph W. Newman, who was a marketing faculty member at the Michigan Business School from 1949-51 and again from 1965-73, helped greatly through his books and research publications to deepen the impact on the marketing discipline of concepts including economics and decision theory, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, especially through the qualitative research techniques of motivational research. Along with his doctoral students, he published highly impactful research on how consumers gather and use pre-purchase information. He also published research on customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. For these and other contributions, he was named a fellow of the Association of Consumer Research in 1990, its highest honor. In the decades since, the marketing faculty at Michigan Ross has continued to make many more notable contributions to our understanding of consumer behavior.