B-School Bulletin: HBS MBAs Reflect On Summer Internships

Chatting with Barry Nalebuff, Milton Steinbach Professor at Yale SOM and cofounder with Seth Goldman ’95 of Honest Tea. Yale SOM photo

Leveraging The Yale Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

News from Yale SOM

“I was born and grew up in Belgium. At home we spoke French and English, and I studied in Dutch. As a family we traveled a lot to the U.S. and Spain and lived there for months at a time. Taking the time to participate in local life made me love the differences of cultures and pushed my curiosity about how ‘things’ worked around the world. This led me to study food science and engineering in Brussels and Canada. I chose these studies because, as much as cultures might differ from each other, food always plays a central role in any society.

“After graduation I started working in the natural food ingredient industry. The food industry has a large impact both people and the environment. Food ingredient suppliers sit between farmers and end consumers, so they are concerned about the sustainability of their raw material as well as the health impact of their ingredients. This is all tied together by emotions. Recently, many startup companies have found ways to disrupt the food industry by being more conscious about the ingredients they use — a field where I feel I can help greatly. This need — and my hope for healthier and more sustainable food — have strongly attracted me to these entrepreneurs.”

MIT

The World Economic Forum Warns That AI May Destabilize The Financial System

News from MIT Sloan School of Management

“Artificial intelligence will reshape the world of finance over the next decade or so by automating investing and other services — but it could also introduce troubling systematic weaknesses and risks, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF).

“Compiled through interviews with dozens of leading financial experts and industry leaders, the report concludes that artificial intelligence will disrupt the industry by allowing early adopters to outmaneuver competitors. It also suggests that the technology will create more convenient products for consumers, such as sophisticated tools for managing personal finances and investments. “”

“But most notably, the report points to the potential for big financial institutions to build machine-learning-based services that live in the cloud and are accessed by other institutions.”

Martin Shubik. Yale photo

Prof. Martin Shubik, Influential Game Theory Scholar, Dies

News from Yale SOM

“Martin Shubik, the Seymour H. Knox Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Institutional Economics, died on Wednesday, August 22, 2018.

“A member of the Yale faculty since 1963 and a founding member of the Yale SOM faculty, Professor Shubik was a specialist in strategic analysis, the economics of corporate competition, and the study of financial institutions.”

Eric Schwartz. Ross photo

Getting the Lead Out: Data Science and Flint Pipes

News from University of Michigan Ross School of Business

“Copper or lead? It’s the burning question in Flint as the painstaking process to find, remove and replace lead pipes continues this summer.

“University of Michigan students and professors, working with the city, helped answer that question with data science that predicts which homes have lead pipes. They estimated that three out of four houses in Flint have lead in their service lines, which are the pipes connecting each home to the city water system.

“’Knowing which homes to inspect can reduce the costs of replacing their pipes with safer ones and more efficiently get the lead out of Flint,’ said Eric Schwartz, U-M assistant professor of marketing at the Ross School of Business. ‘The approach could serve as a model for other cities to follow.’”

Collaborate, But Only Intermittently, According To New Study By HBS Professor And Colleagues

News from HBS

Ethan Bernstein. HBS photo

“More than a decade after the introduction of the first smartphone, we are now awash in always-on technologies — email, IM, social media, Slack, Yammer, and so on. All that connectivity means we are constantly sharing our ideas, knowledge, thinking, and answers. Surely that ‘wisdom of the crowd’ is good for problem solving at work, right?

“New research by Harvard Business School associate professor Ethan Bernstein and colleagues, now available online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), suggests that ‘always on’ may not be always effective. ‘Intermittently on’ might, instead, be better for complex problem solving.

“In their study the three researchers — Bernstein from Harvard Business School, Assistant Professor Jesse Shore from the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, and Professor David Lazer from Northeastern University — put together and studied the results of a number of three-person groups performing a complex problem-solving task. The members of one set of groups never interacted with each other, solving the problem in complete isolation; members of another set of groups constantly interacted with each other, as we do when equipped with always-on technologies; and a third set of groups interacted only intermittently.”