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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every innovation or new product development team faces a fundamental tension: When does one transition from the ideation to the execution phase? Too early a transition risks missing a great yet unrealized idea, and too late a transition risks being unable to bring the product to market on time. This significant and ubiquitous tension poses a challenge for researchers because of the nuanced nature of imagination and creativity and the need to combine that with creating an actual item based on one’s designs. In “Ideation-Execution Transition in Product Development: An Experimental Analysis” (Management Science, 2018) by Michigan Ross Professors Stephen Leider and William Lovejoy, as well as their colleague Evgeny Kagan from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, the authors use a novel experimental design to reveal some expected outcomes (later transitions do not change mean performance but increase variance and risk significantly) and some unexpected ones (it is not so much the timing of the transition that drives mean performance, but rather who has decision rights). Specifically, designers should not make the transition decision; the timing should be an exogenously imposed constraint. This external requirement significantly changes designers’ behaviors and results.

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 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.

In 1991, Professor Priscilla Rodgers designed an assessment to help the Michigan Business School evaluate MBA students' written communication skills, which was used for course placement. When the GMAT added an Analytical Writing Assessment in 1994, Rodgers conducted research that showed the AWA did not accurately assess management communication and that the assessment criteria and methodology used at the business school were far more meaningful. Rodgers and her team developed five six-point scales that quantified the competencies that MBA students need to be effective writers. In 2017, the business communication area at Michigan Ross moved to an assessment of MBA students' management communication, which included speaking as well as writing, and allowed students to choose a non-credit path toward satisfying the communication requirement. Andrea Morrow, lecturer and director of writing programs, developed a framework based on Rodgers' work called the Ross Management Communication Competencies Framework. As part of the new assessment process, full-time, global, and online MBA students learn about management communication and are assessed using Morrow's framework. If their results show they are low in any of the five competency areas, they can opt to complete targeted work on Canvas, or they can opt to take a business communication class. No other business school has a program like this.

As the worlds of trade and culture were globalized in the 1980s, consumers worldwide saw standardized global brands enter and grow in their local markets, displacing local brands that had been dominant for decades. But what were consumers seeing in these global brands, and why were consumers switching to them? How could local brands fight back? These timely and important questions were addressed in a series of research papers by Michigan Ross Professor Rajeev Batra and his co-authors from 1999 through 2019. They showed that if consumers perceived brands as being global, they assumed these brands were of higher quality, capable of bestowing more prestige and status to their buyers, and would bring these buyers closer to the imagined lifestyles of consumers in the home countries of these brands. These papers have been cited over 6,000 times, have been nominated for and won multiple best-paper awards in journals and societies of international marketing, and have been included in lists of the 10 papers in the last 30 years that have made the most contribution to the international marketing literature. Today, as the lure of globalization seems to be receding and local brands seem to be winning again, this work highlights the tensions and trade-offs at play.

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.

"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."

Professor George Siedel was a pioneer in developing the concept of law as a source of competitive advantage. This concept originated in his 2002 book: Using the Law for Competitive Advantage. In an article in the Academy of Management Executive, Robert Thomas (past president of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business), concluded that the book "is trailblazing in its assertion that legal issues are critical strategic variables in business planning." Siedel later emphasized an international dimension to his work in his 2010 book: Proactive Law for Managers: A Hidden Source of Competitive Advantage. This work has served as a foundation for academic and practitioner interest in the design and simplification of contracts and other legal documents.