Dear friends:
At the Carson College, our faculty and doctoral students drive innovation in entrepreneurship by producing research designed to introduce new ideas to companies, both small and large. Some researchers study the practice of entrepreneurship itself. More broadly, we strive to infuse innovative thinking into business products and processes, whether for a startup or a well-established, multinational corporation.
In addition to the entrepreneurship research paper by management student Md Kamrul Hasan and Associate Professor Ben Warnick, which we highlight in this edition of the eDividend, several other students have been working on innovative approaches to business.
Finance student Ruixue (Rachel) Gao has been studying the participation and impact of female inventors in green technology innovation. Her research found the participation of female inventors in green technology is rising, and environmental patents involving female inventors generate higher economic value. It also found publicly traded US firms with female environmental inventors produce more follow-on green innovations and invest more in research and development activities in subsequent years.
Operations and management science student Shirin Shahsavand has been analyzing the fast-fashion industry and the devasting environmental impacts stemming from discarded clothing. She is modeling the economic viability of retailer take-back programs that would provide discounts on new items when customers return old, unwanted clothes. The return process would redirect the old clothing for proper reuse or recycling.
Pingping Tang, another operations and management science student, has been examining the prevalence of “lightning deals” on the Amazon.com platform. These are very short-term sales that offer deep discounts. Entrepreneurial startups, in particular, can use lightning deals to gain product awareness and move up the all-important vendor ranking list for their respective product class.
Two examples from former students include hospitality and tourism management graduate Demi Deng, who studied innovative approaches to Washington wine marketing, and management graduate Smita Srivastava, who had a project titled, “Being Alert and Imagining Idea: All About Entrepreneurs.”
Through efforts such as these, our students are helping to drive entrepreneurship and economic growth by bringing new ideas to industry.
Chuck Munson,
PhD Program Director