Professor Jim Walsh played a significant role in the development of work on individual, group, and collective cognition in organizations. Interested in managerial mistakes, Walsh wanted to know if executives’ worldviews could blind them to their decision environments. He was also interested in learning how the cognitive capabilities of both leadership teams and the organization itself could be harnessed for the good of organizations. In a 1988 Academy of Management Journal article, Walsh traced how these belief structures might or might not blind executives to their decision environments. He also considered how these belief structures may or may not combine to shape team decision-making. Therefore, he wrote a theoretical paper about these possibilities, which was published in the Journal of Management in 1986. He followed up that article with an empirical effort to measure and trace the impact of “negotiated belief structures” on decision-making (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes published his findings in 1988). His thoughts then turned to the organization as a whole. He wrote a seminal paper on organizational memory, one that identified the nature of information selection, retention, and retrieval processes in organizations – for the good or ill of those organizations. That work was published in the Academy of Management Review in 1991. When interest in cognition in organizations started to grow, Walsh became a founding officer of the Academy of Management’s Managerial and Organizational Cognition Interest Group in 1990 and helped to lead that pioneering group of scholars for the first three years of its existence. Tying all of the insights and experiences together, he wrote what became something of a field-defining scholarly paper in 1995. Titled “Managerial Organizational Cognition: Notes from a Trip Down Memory Lane,” it was published in Organization Science. Today the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management is home to more than 1,200 scholars worldwide. Citing his foundational scholarship and early leadership, the Division honored Jim with its Distinguished Scholar Award in 2020.

In their paper, “Crowdfunding the Front Lines: An Empirical Study of Teacher-Driven School Improvement,” Professors Samantha Keppler, Jun Li, and Andrew Wu conducted the first large-scale empirical test of the frontline improvement theory in K-12 schools. The theory, originating in automotive manufacturing, states that empowering front-line employees to identify organizational and process problems and implement solutions improves organizational performance and customer satisfaction. In this case, the team of Michigan Ross professors was interested in how teacher-identified problems in the classroom and crowd-funded solutions improved learning outcomes for K-12 students.

The team analyzed data on thousands of K-12 teacher projects on the largest teacher crowdfunding site, DonorsChoose. They found that one funded project (about $400 in value), on average, achieves a significant increase in the percentage of students scoring basic and above on all tested subjects in high school, as well as science and language arts in primary and middle schools. This effect translates to two-nine additional students moving up to at least a basic level of proficiency in the correlating subject. The effect of these projects is greatest in low-income schools, where funded projects, on average, move four-10 additional students to at least a basic level of proficiency in tested subjects.

From the textual analyses of the teacher's written statements about the impact of the projects in their schools, Keppler, Li, and Wu additionally learned that student academic performance is significantly better when teachers use crowd-funded money to improve knowledge retention, as a repeated learning tool, and to differentiate or personalize learning.

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.

Professor Jim Walsh was elected as the 65th president of the Academy of Management in 2006, making him only the second Michigan faculty member to lead the Academy. Walsh took stock of the approximately 16,000 members who lived in more than 100 countries at the time and noted that very few of them resided on the continent of Africa. Knowing that Africa, the cradle of civilization, is home to over a billion people and more than 1,000 universities and that the continent was poised for enormous population and economic growth, he wanted to bridge the gap and reach out to the teacher-scholars on the continent. Fully aware of the terrible history of colonization, he decided to simply create space for colleagues in Africa to meet their colleagues from the rest of the world. The first step in the process was to work with others to co-found the African Academy of Management. His continued work culminated in a 2013 AOM Africa Conference, in which approximately 300 colleagues from the world over journeyed to Johannesburg to share and imagine new research and teaching ideas. Since that time, the Africa Academy of Management has hosted a number of faculty development workshops, launched the Africa Journal of Management, and held conferences across the continent. In short, Africa-centered scholarship has burgeoned. Beyond that, the Ross School was just granted affiliate member status in the Association of African Business Schools. Professor Walsh wanted to be sure that we too are a part of the emerging scholarly conversations and evolving business practices on the continent.

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.

In a paper published as a lead article in the Journal of Finance in 1990, Professor Nejat Seyhun investigated whether informed investors stabilize and correct mistakes in security prices by buying undervalued assets and selling overvalued assets or destabilize security prices by jumping into already overpriced securities to create bigger bubbles and mis-valuations first, only to exploit them later. Seyhun's investigation centered on the stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market crashed by 22% in one day. He found that top corporate insiders bought undervalued stocks and sold overvalued stocks in record quantities immediately following the crash. Hence, informed insiders were stabilizing security prices and not destabilizing them further. This finding provides comfort that the stock market will be self-policing and self-correcting and justifies the current regulatory system, which assumes that more information is beneficial by requiring timely, accurate, and full dissemination of information from all parties involved. Seyhun was among the first to explore various aspects of reported insider trading and its effects on share prices and shareholder wealth.

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.

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.

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 1991, Dean Joe White and Associate Dean Paul Danos introduced the groundbreaking Multidisciplinary Action Projects course to the MBA curriculum. The initial full-time, seven-week project established a team of MBA students to work on a real-world business challenge for a sponsor company. After a pilot run, the course became part of the MBA core curriculum in 1993. In the coming years, MAP would be added to other MBA programs and eventually to most of the school’s degree programs.

Since its inception, many other schools have incorporated project-based opportunities into their degree programs. However, Michigan Ross remains the leader in the space, and MAP has stood as a beacon of innovation and impact within the realm of graduate studies. What has truly set the MAP program apart is its unwavering commitment to bridging the gap between theory and practice. Instead of confining students to lecture halls, the program enables students to venture into the field, partnering with corporations, nonprofits, and startups to address genuine business challenges and exposing students to the intricacies of various industries while cultivating their ability to think critically, adapt swiftly, and communicate effectively.

Over the years, more than 3,200 MAP projects have been completed by Michigan Ross students. Today, more than 1,000 students participate annually in a MAP project as a required component of their degree program. The organizations they work with range from Fortune 100 multinational corporations to start-ups and non-profits, developing impactful products and addressing some of society's biggest challenges.

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.

In 1998, Professor David Hirshleifer of the Michigan Business School, and two co-authors, published a paper titled "Investor Psychology and Security Market Under- and Overreactions." This paper has been widely recognized as the first explanation of the seemingly contradictory behavior in asset prices (under- and overreactions to different news) based on two well documented behavioral biases. The biases outlined in the paper are overconfidence (regarding the precision of one's private information) and biased self-attribution. The former leads to well documented evidence of long-term overreaction (price reversals), while the latter causes underreaction (momentum) in the medium term. This paper was the first widely recognized paper in finance based on departures from rational behavior and provided a compelling explanation for seemingly anomalous behavior in asset prices.

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 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.

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.

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 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.