Idea posted: April 2015

Institutions: Duke University Fuqua School of Business    University of East Anglia   

In the early 1990s, large corporations started moving, slowly and almost imperceptibly at first, away from the kind of broad scientific research that led to such inventions as Nylon and…

Idea posted: April 2015

Institutions: University of St. Gallen   

While corporations are engaging in socially responsible initiatives related to their industries or to benefit their communities (supporting organizations to help the needy, for example), some companies are going one…

Idea posted: April 2015

Institutions: ESMT European School of Management and Technology    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology   

Research has shown that downsizing will often have a direct negative impact on customer satisfaction, and this negative impact results in a decline in business performance. This causal chain seems…

Idea posted: April 2015

Institutions: Duke University Fuqua School of Business    Kellogg School of Management    Georgetown University McDonough School of Business   

More and more board of directors have the CEO as the only insider on the board. At first glance, this movement toward near unanimous outside directors would seem to meet…

Idea posted: April 2015

Institutions: Cornell University    University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business    Washington University Olin Business School    Vanderbilt University   

Conventional wisdom has it that diversity helps creativity, in that people in homogenous groups are similar to one another with similar ideas and therefore less divergent thinking occurs. Also most…

Idea posted: April 2015

Institutions: City University of Hong Kong    University of Toronto Rotman School of Management    Kellogg School of Management   

An investigation into the problems of the 1973 Ford Pinto, a car susceptible to catastrophic explosions when rear-ended, revealed that Ford’s engineers had calculated that the company could save $11…

Idea posted: March 2015

Institutions: Claremont Graduate University Drucker School of Management   

With the dominant, almost overwhelming impact that social media has on just about any function of a business, it’s easy to forget that social media is barely a decade old.…

Idea posted: March 2015

Institutions: University of Southern California Marshall School of Business    University of Toronto Rotman School of Management   

Companies marketing a new innovation or a new technology are rarely interested in older consumers, and for good reason. Past research shows that older consumers are much less likely to…

Idea posted: March 2015

Institutions: Chinese University of Hong Kong    Kellogg School of Management   

Personnel policies are often considered in the context of the individual — policies related to hiring, promoting, and firing individuals, for example. However, personnel policies must operate within the context…