Business and management

Smithsonian Magazine’s Kristen A. Schmitt spotlights LymeAlert, an at-home screening kit to detect Lyme disease in ticks created by alumna Erin Dawicki MBA ‘24. Once we figured out how to do this, it almost felt like a moral obligation,” says Dawicki. “We have the ability to get this out into the world, and it can become a pretty affordable way to try and prevent as many of these cases of long-term Lyme as we can.” 

Principal Research Scientist John Liu speaks to Manufacturing Dive’s Nathan Owens about MIT’s Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), a 12-month-long certificate program designed to "bring experienced technicians into leadership roles with a focus on advanced manufacturing needs.” Says Liu: "We’re looking at developing this elite workforce who bridges the gap. What we’re trying to do is upskill the technician.” 

Bloomberg’s Gautam Mukunda highlights Prof. Scott Stern’s finding that 0.07% of business registrations in the 2010s reached meaningful acquisition within six years, and Prof. Danielle Li and Prof. Lindsey Raymond’s finding that AI technologies increased customer support agent productivity by 15%, to predict AI’s role in the influx of business applications filed in June.  

Prof. Tavneet Suri joins NPR’s Robert Smith, host of “Planet Money,” to discuss several economic and business development programs in Kenya and Nigeria, and the lessons they offer for business students and entrepreneurs. “I do think that core to the growth of an economy is this thing we call human capital, which is about the education and the health of your population,” says Suri. “It's the sort of, in quotes, "capital" that a human brings to the table.” 

Fortune reporter Preston Fore highlights Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee's warning that companies should not replace entry level jobs with AI. “[I]f you’re pulling back on your entry-level hiring, you are probably sacrificing future opportunities to learn and the skilled people of the future,” says McAfee. “You’re also turning off the spigot of the most enthusiastic power users of AI in your organization.”  

Alumnus Vikas Enti ‘20, founder of Reframe Systems, speaks to Boston 25 about his company’s work aimed at lowering the time and costs of home building with their new system that they used to robotically fabricate a residential building in Somerville. “We went from starting foundation work to handing keys over to our customer in about 180 days,” says Enti. “It would typically take about 18 months to build a structure like this in cities like Somerville—it's almost three times faster. Our units also cost 20% lower than traditional construction costs.” 

Richard Locke, dean of MIT Sloan School of Management, speaks to Poets&Quants reporter Marc Ethier about Sloan’s new evening MBA program, designed for full-time workers. “There’s an incredibly rich population in the Boston-New England regional area who have the same grades, the same test scores, the same experience as our current MBA students,” says Locke. “The one exception is they don’t want to leave their jobs. They want to continue to work, but they want to actually get an MBA from a place like MIT Sloan. They want to accelerate their careers where they are.” 

Boston Business Journal’s Maya Shavit showcases MIT Sloan School of Management’s new evening Master of Business Administration degree, designed for full-time workers, which will welcome its first cohort in August 2027. “MIT has strong ties to so many firms and organizations in this ecosystem, but if we could actually be pumping out even more high-skilled, highly talented, ambitious future leaders in the local economy that’s only going to be good for the regional economy,” says Richard Locke, dean of MIT Sloan.  

Times Higher Education ranks MIT as the number one university for business degrees in their 2026 World University Rankings list, highlighting the Sloan School of Management’s MBA courses, executive training programs, and broad undergraduate management course offerings. “There is an emphasis on innovation across all these topics. Many influential new ideas in business, including the field of system dynamics, were born out of work at the Sloan School.”

In a study examining the impact of AI tools on software development, researchers from MIT and Wharton examined the work of more than 100,000 developers and found a significant gap between what AI tools generate and the amount of software delivered to companies. Writing for Quartz, reporter Anthony Lopopolo notes: “The upshot [of the research] is that AI and human effort aren't substitutes at any stage beyond raw code generation. You can't replace reviewing, testing, and release management with more lines of code.”

Sloan Senior lecturer Ben Shields speaks with GBH reporter Rafael Nam about why tickets for the World Cup opening match have not yet sold out. “The hope or bet — for FIFA is that once the matches start — and the greatest players in the world compete for the most prestigious prize of them all, the sport as business lens will fade into the background and the World Cup will be seen and experienced as the enduring global institution that it is,” says Shields. 

Wall Street Journal reporter Gary Rivlin speaks with Prof. Daron Acemoglu about the growing use of AI in the business world. “Whether you’re a CEO, a manager, a journalist, a professor or a construction worker, I see your skills as beyond what AI can perform,” says Acemoglu. 

Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch highlights a new study by Prof. Mert Demirer and colleagues that examines productivity levels among software developers work before and after they adopted AI tools. Burn-Murdoch notes the paper found that “AI delivers big productivity boosts for low-level tasks, but these translate into much smaller gains for final products.” 

Prof. David Simchi-Levi speaks with Seb Murray of the Financial Times about how in an effort to increase their supply-chain resilience, companies are increasingly investing in digital tools to map supply chains, identify hidden vulnerabilities across supplier networks and prepare contingency plans. “It’s not enough to use intuition and experience,” Simchi-Levi explains. “You need data and analytics.”