Faculty Viewpoints

Defense spending has been a key driver of technology and innovation in the United States since the beginning of the Cold War, according to Yale SOM professor Paul Bracken. The Pentagon was a prime funder for the early growth of Silicon Valley and more recently quietly created another technology hub, focusing on defense, in northern Virginia.

Many companies use crowdsourcing in search of new ideas. But in a video interview for ESMT’s Knowledge series, Professor Linus Dahlander says that organizations seeking crowdsourced ideas end up sticking with the most familiar ones.

The holiday season is a time for joy and family and a staggering amount of shopping. In a video interview on UCD Smurfit’s Faculty Insights series, Professor Damien McLoughlin says that marketers make those sales by taking advantage of our holiday impulses, including the drive to be cheerful.

Nobel Laureate Robert J. Shiller says that an event on the magnitude of the 2008-2009 financial crisis has to have many causes, but he sees “the spirit of the times” as a driving force behind many of them. In a lecture at Yale SOM, he described how he sees this spirit acting in everything from Fed policy to the growth in casinos.

Europe is still struggling to emerge from the financial crisis. Though recent stress tests by the European Central Bank gave passing grades to 90% of the region’s banks, critics question the transparency and rigor of the tests. Professor Sascha Steffen of ESMT European School of Management and Technology, a member of the Global Network for Advanced Management, talked with Yale Insights about the state of the banking system and the challenges of designing and implementing a single system to oversee banks across the Eurozone.

If there’s one way to score a best-selling book, it’s to write about the next big thing in business. For many, design thinking has become that thing. But is it a fad or a reliable tool for building better products, services, and business processes?

In a New York Times op-ed, Professor Robert J. Shiller explains that stock market movements are driven by popular narratives that spread like “thought viruses.” Secular stagnation—the idea that the global economy may languish for years to come—is the current story driving down the stock market. Whether true or false, the idea alone has the potential to erase five years of gains and create a bear market.

Millions of people around the world want to swim in tropical waters and take in unsullied wilderness. Can the Philippines build a productive ecotourism industry around its natural environment? The Asian Institute of Management’s Fernando Y. Roxas talks about the country’s chances of claiming a link in the “tourism supply chain.”

In the introductory lecture of his course Global Financial Crisis, Andrew Metrick describes how the financial panic of 2008 and the ensuing recession have created a new economic reality.

Globalization means that people from different countries are working together more and more. In her research, INSEAD’s Erin Meyer examines the cultural differences that can trip up global business relationships—and proposes methods for avoiding problems.