The Y-Prize Competition is all about sparking innovation at Penn. Tom Fitzsimons, CEO of Kerathin LLC, discusses why the competition is unique and what made this year’s prizewinning idea stand out. What makes the Y-Prize competition interesting to you? The goal of the Y-Prize competition is to get a different perspective…Read More
The Mack Institute co-hosted its annual Wharton Technology and Innovation Conference on April 12 and 13, 2014. This guest post by Glenn Hoetker (W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University) summarizes one of the papers for which he was a discussant. In the global competition for innovative success, location matters.…Read More
The Mack Institute is thrilled to announce Emily Plumb, a Mechanical Engineering Masters student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), as the winner of the 2013-2014 Y-Prize Competition. Emily is a passionate advocate of STEM education for young children, and her enthusiasm showed clearly throughout her presentation at…Read More
The first round of the 2013-2014 Y-Prize saw a wide range of inventive submissions from student teams across the university. Now, four finalist teams are hard at work (with assistance from their GRASP Lab tech consultants and Wharton business consultants) to perfect their ideas for commercializing Penn robotics technology. As a testament to the…Read More
Customers often face frustrating service experiences, from long lines to grumpy employees. However, what do these frustrations look like from the lens of service providers? Hosted by Mack Institute Co-Director and Professor of Operations and Information Management Christian Terwiesch and Professor of Operations and Information Management Marshall Fisher, the show…Read More
Supporting students in their innovation-related pursuits is an important part of the Mack Institute’s mission. We sponsor the Wharton Technology Club, helping them bring tech industry players to campus to share their experience and knowledge with students. This guest post by incoming club president Stephanie Au gives a peek at…Read More
Centuries after Socrates proclaimed “the unexamined life is not worth living,” managers have begun subjecting their routine processes for handling people to analysis. Organizations are asking questions about how effective their processes for hiring, firing, paying, and evaluating employees are, and they are looking to quantitative data for answers. This…Read More
Every year, the Wharton School hosts two Global Forums that bring together leaders from business and government, provide an opportunity for alumni to connect, and showcase faculty’s research. In the spring of 2014 our Co-director (and today’s guest author) Nicolaj Siggelkow attended the Global Forum in Panama, which included more than 300 participants.…Read More
Guest post by Sid Kumar (WG’09), Global Head of Customer Lifecycle Solutions at CA Technologies Today, CA Technologies announced that we have joined the Wharton School’s Mack Institute as a corporate partner. There are many reasons that this is a natural fit for us, but chief among them is the…Read More
The Mack Institute’s recent “How Far Beyond the Pill?” workshop examined pharma’s urgent need to develop “Beyond the Pill Solutions” (BTPS) in order to confront the many challenges currently facing the industry. In Part I, guest author Prashant Nikam (WG’11) of Sanofi Oncology enumerates these challenges and defines their solution…Read More
Guest post by Prashant Nikam (WG’11), Global Marketing Lead, Mozobil and Legacy Brands at Sanofi Oncology Over the past year, I have been working with Professor George Day on researching a topic that is very dear to me: “Beyond the Pill Solutions” (BTPS) and what they mean for the pharmaceutical…Read More
Guest post by Anuj Kapoor, WG’13. As a recent graduate of Wharton’s MBA program in Healthcare Management, I wanted to explore some of the greatest challenges that the pharma industry is grappling with today. The perfect opportunity to do cutting edge research arose in the form of a project with…Read More
With cloud computing on the rise and hardware becoming increasingly commoditized, it hardly comes as a surprise that IBM, Google, and Sony decided to simultaneously liquidate portions of their hardware businesses in a two-week span earlier this year. However, Chinese tech giant Lenovo has taken a completely opposite approach, purchasing…Read More
Innovation tournaments are an increasingly popular tool for organizations looking for fresh ideas: they open the gates to ideas from all employees, especially those on the front lines, and let people vote on their colleagues’ ideas to narrow the pool. This leads to consideration of increasingly smaller groups of ideas…Read More
When the Mack Center became the Mack Institute in 2013, thanks to a major gift from William and Phyllis Mack, our name wasn’t the only thing to change. We received a mandate to expand the institute’s reach as the central hub of an extensive learning network, connecting researchers, business leaders,…Read More
Our longtime corporate partners at Teradata are frequent and enthusiastic participants at our yearly conferences. One attendee, Monica Mullen, recently shared her key takeaways from our recent Fall Conference. Her post originally appeared in the company’s Industry Experts blog. I had the pleasure of talking with Mr. J. David Power…Read More
Mack Institute events don’t typically include references to farming techniques, but the Fall Conference 2013 was a rare exception. In this video summary of his presentation, Takeshi Yamaguchi describes how Nissan’s approach to advanced technical development resembles the cultivation of an orchard. Instead of a linear approach, Nissan achieves successful…Read More
The following is an excerpt from an article in the Wharton Magazine’s Winter 2014 issue. Text by Ken Stier, illustrations by Harry Campbell. When NASA had its R&D budget slashed, it came to its partner, the Mack Institute, to assist it in crowdsourcing many of its most pressing problems. Solutions…Read More
What happens when two industries with fundamentally different clockspeeds converge within a single product? In a recent Knowledge@Wharton article, Program on Vehicle and Mobility Innovation Director John Paul MacDuffie discusses the challenges of integrating IT-based technology, such as computer-based collision avoidance systems, into automobiles. MacDuffie highlights the tight integration of…Read More
Guest post by Ryan McConville, Mack Institute MBA Research Fellow, Wharton Executive MBA For students interested in exploring early stage business technologies, the Mack Institute is the perfect partner. Other Wharton outlets, such as the Business Plan Competition, might focus on ideas that are ready to market today; the Mack…Read More
