On Friday, September 26, the Mack Institute, in partnership with EVERSANA, AWS and Modus Create, hosted Disrupting the Life Sciences Commercial Model: Exploring the Future Impact of AI and Patient-Centric Healthcare. This intimate event brought together senior executives from pharma and medtech with Wharton and Penn faculty to explore how AI,…Read More
The U.S. Department of Defense is one of the most complex organizations in the world — so how is it approaching generative AI? A new report from Wharton’s Prof. Serguei Netessine and WG’25 Andrew Stiles examines the DoD’s early steps toward integrating GenAI and highlights lessons that industry leaders can…Read More 
The Mack Institute is pleased to announce a new course for MBA students, Commercialization of Academic Science, piloting in Fall 2025. This hands-on course pairs student teams with Penn researchers who are developing cutting-edge technologies across healthcare, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more. Students will be tasked with conducting customer discovery,…Read More
Startup acquisitions by established firms are becoming more common, especially in fast-moving industries like tech and healthcare. But integrating a newly-acquired startup presents challenges, and can end up quashing creativity and worsening innovation outcomes. A new study, funded in part by the Mack Institute and conducted by Mack Core Team…Read More 
The Mack Institute is proud to release our newest work of original research, When Goliath Needs David: How Corporations and Startups are Redefining Corporate Venturing. Based on a systematic review of the world’s 500 largest companies, it presents a data-driven analysis of how corporations are partnering with startups to fuel…Read More 
Corporate Venturing 2025: A New Model of Corporate-Startup Interaction Tuesday, June 24 | 2:00 p.m. | via Zoom Join us for a webinar marking the release of our new report, When Goliath Needs David: How Corporations and Startups Are Redefining Corporate Venturing. The report explores how established companies are increasingly…Read More 
Penn Hyperloop, a student team sponsored in part by the Mack Institute, made an impressive showing at The Boring Company’s “Not-a-Boring” Competition, a global contest that challenges university teams to design and build advanced tunnel boring machines. Competing against top engineering programs from around the world, Penn Hyperloop earned third…Read More
Mack Institute predoctoral fellow Lennart Meincke, Wharton Professor Gideon Nave, and Mack Institute Co-Director Christian Terwiesch have published a new paper on AI and creativity in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behaviour. Building on growing research into how artificial intelligence can support idea generation, their study reveals a crucial tradeoff:…Read More
This spring, a student team from the Mack Institute for Innovation Management collaborated with Penn’s Computational Social Science (CSS) Lab to explore how to bring the lab’s latest innovation, an AI-powered media bias detection tool, to market. The student team is Jieru Shi (WG'25), Keshav Ramesh (W'25) and Caleb Yam…Read More 
Algorithms shape countless decisions in our digital lives, powering everything from personalized ads to loan approvals. Many of the most powerful algorithms are so-called “black box” algorithms, meaning that no one, not even the developers building them or the businesses deploying them, fully understands how they work. While these hyper-complex…Read More
Friday, March 21, 2025 The Wharton School, Philadelphia The Mack Institute is pleased to announce our Spring 2025 conference, Productivity in the Age of Intelligent Automation. This one-day event will bring together leading Wharton researchers and expert business practitioners to examine the uncertain question of how artificial intelligence will impact…Read More 
Congratulations to this year’s Y-Prize winners, Stentix! The team proposed a bile duct stent that can be adjusted noninvasively, helping to maintain bile flow without additional surgeries. A biliary stent is a small, tube-like device inserted into the bile ducts to keep them open and allow bile to flow from…Read More
Prof. Christian Terwiesch, Mack Institute co-director, and Lennart Meincke, Mack Institute predoctoral fellow, have co-authored a new working paper on chatbot design and workflow integration, the latest in Prof. Terwiesch's series of papers on practical applications of Generative AI. The paper devises a framework for chatbot implementation based on varying…Read More 
Dear friends of the Mack Institute, As the year draws to a close and the holiday season approaches, we’re reflecting on one of the busiest and most transformative years in the Mack Institute’s history. In 2024, we broadened our scope, forging new partnerships and launching impactful initiatives across our…Read More
Congratulations to the four student teams chosen as finalists for this year’s Y-Prize competition: Serpent, EmBrace, Agentis and Stentix! The Y-Prize competition challenges students to build their entrepreneurial skills by creating business plans for technologies invented at Penn Engineering. The team with the best commercial application wins $10,000 to help make…Read More
AI-Driven Innovation Fall 2024 Conference Report Artificial Intelligence has emerged as one of the most transformative technologies of our time, reshaping industries and redefining the competitive landscape. Yet the complexities and costs associated with AI development and deployment, coupled with the uncertainty of value creation, make it clear that no…Read More 
In more and more workplaces, important decisions aren’t made by managers but by algorithms which have increasing levels of access to and control over workers. While algorithmic management can boost efficiency and flexibility (as well as enabling a new class of quasi-self-employed workers on platforms like Uber and Instacart), critics…Read More
Friday, November 8, 2024 The Wharton School, Philadelphia The Mack Institute is pleased to announce our Fall 2024 conference, AI-Driven Innovation Ecosystems. Bringing together leading Wharton researchers with expert business practitioners, this one-day conference will explore how firms can overcome the risks and high costs of AI development and implementation…Read More
The Y-Prize Competition kicked off this week with a well-attended event held in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall. Now in its thirteenth year, the Y-Prize challenges students to hone their entrepreneurial skills by creating business plans using cutting-edge technology developed at Penn Engineering. The team that comes up with the most promising commercial…Read More
Collaboration between industry and academia drives innovation forward, but creating a successful partnership—and measuring its impact—is more challenging than it might appear. We spoke to Wharton’s David Hsu about his new paper, forthcoming in Management Science, on what makes industry-university collaboration successful, the importance of viewing innovation as a long-term…Read More
