After the Covid-19 pandemic caused a drop in revenue, Christine Marcus MBA '12 reinvented Alchemista, her food tech delivery service, reports Geri Stengel for Forbes. Marcus targeted the home market allowing property managers to “use temperature-controlled food lockers as vending machines to offer meals, snacks, and more in the lobby or another common area,” writes Stengel.
During CNBC’s Technology Executive Council summit, Prof. Christopher Magee related how “allocating R&D resources efficiently is a critical skill, but one that most companies struggle with,” according to CNBC reporter Susan Caminiti. Magee's latest research “uses AI to predict the speed of the development of specific new innovations, all with the goal of deploying resources smartly and effectively,” writes Caminiti.
A new study by Prof. Danielle Li and University of Minnesota Prof. Alan Benson explores the gender promotion gap, writes Boston Globe reporter Kevin Lewis. “Researchers found that women were given lower ratings of future potential but higher ratings on current performance – a phenomenon that explained up to half of the overall gender disparity in promotion,” writes Lewis.
Institute Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues make the case in a piece for Wired that using the Turing test to help develop AI technologies for businesses has led to a “fundamental mismatch between the needs of business and the way AI is currently being conceived by many in the technology sector.” They write: “Businesses that find a productive way of using machine intelligence will lead by example, and their example can be followed by other companies and researchers freeing themselves from the increasingly unhelpful AI paradigm.”
Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, speaks with Brian Cheung of Yahoo Finance about climate change, the path to net-zero emissions and COP26. “What is extremely important is to send the clear signal that this policy [the Paris Climate Agreement] is going to stay,” says Paltsev of his hopes for COP26. “Because what the investors need, what the companies need, they need to see that these targets are solid, that we are not going to give away and give up, even though we are not there in terms of the emission reduction.”
Writing for Quartz, Sloan Prof. Abdullah Almaatouq and Prof. Duncan Watts of the University of Pennsylvania explore the costs and benefits of being part of a team when completing a task. “The bottom line is that for simple tasks,” they write, “the cost of teamwork exceeds the benefit, whereas for complex tasks the benefits of teamwork surpass the costs, leading to greater efficiency.”
Forbes contributor Adi Gaskell writes that a study by MIT researchers finds “women tend to be under-represented in managerial roles in large part because their leadership skills are undervalued.” Gaskell writes that: “the MIT findings should provide a fresh incentive for organizations to look afresh at their assessment and promotion practices to ensure they're not only fair to all employees, but are most effective in rewarding those with the most ability.”
Prof. Yossi Sheffi speaks with David Pogue of CBS Sunday Morning about what’s causing the current supply chain breakdowns. "The underlying cause of all of this is actually a huge increase in demand,” says Sheffi. “People did not spend during the pandemic. And then, all the government help came; trillions of dollars went to households. So, they order stuff. They order more and more stuff. And the whole global markets were not ready for this."
Bloomberg Businessweek reporters Brendan Murray and Enda Curran spotlight the MIT Beer Game, a role-playing exercise that is an annual rite-of-passage for first-year Sloan MBA students that “models the supply-and-demand dynamics among a brewery, distributor, wholesaler, and retailer.” “The pandemic revealed flaws that were latent all along our globalized supply chains,” says Prof. John Sterman. “It’s urgent that we figure out how to improve them so we are prepared for the next shocks, whether another pandemic, civil unrest, climate change—or all of the above.”
Alicia Chong Rodriguez SM ’17, SM ’18 speaks with Boston Globe reporter Pranshu Verma about the inspiration for her startup BloomerTech, which is focused on addressing heart disease in women, and the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials. As part of this effort, BloomerTech is developing a “sensor-enabled bra that feeds real-time heart data to doctors running clinical trials on women’s cardiovascular disease.”
A new study co-authored by Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu finds that countries with older workforces are seeing a larger increase in the use of robots, reports Timothy Aeppel for Reuters. Acemoglu and his colleague Pascual Restrepo of Boston University found that “age alone accounted for 35% of the variation between countries in their adoption of robots, with those having older workers far more likely to adopt the machines.”
MIT placed second on U.S. News & World Report’s 2022 annual rankings of the best colleges, reports CBS Boston.
MIT has been named the number 2 university in the U.S. in U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings, reports Abigail Hess for CNBC.
Fortune reporter Nicole Gull McElroy spotlights how the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Master’s Degree program in Integrated Design and Management (IDM), “ is an effort to blend, in a first-of-its-kind approach, engineering and business degrees under the business school’s umbrella.”
Prof. John Sterman speaks with CNBC reporter Diana Olick about the impacts climate change will have on supply chains and how businesses can prepare. “What you want to do as a company is find ways to cut your emissions that also improve your resilience and generate other benefits for you, so that the risks that you face are lower,” says Sterman.