Tag: BCSCI

Evan Dalton, head of digital marketing for WashU Olin’s Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation, wrote this for LinkedIn. It is republished here with permission.

The MSOM Distinguished Fellow Award is widely regarded as the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a research scholar in the field of operations management. This rare distinction, akin to a lifetime achievement award, recognizes outstanding scholarship and research accomplishments throughout one’s career.

This year, the award has been given to Panos Kouvelis, Emerson Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain, Operations, and Technology and director of The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation at WashU Olin Business School. According to the MSOM Society of INFORMS, “The award was created to recognize individuals for significant research accomplishments and exceptional scholarship in the operations management field through sustained research excellence in their activities.”

Kouvelis has had an illustrious career in operations management research thus far, with eight books and more than 135 refereed journal publications. He has been ranked in the top three for operations management research in several categories, including total number of published papers (#3) and publications in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (#1). His work has also been recognized with a 2016 Fellow of POMS Award and a 2020 published laudatio in Production and Operations Management honoring his career.

MSOM Distinguished Fellows are selected by their professional colleagues via a nomination process. A couple of Kouvelis’ peers had the following to say about his research contributions:

“[Panos’] earlier work was definitely more manufacturing planning and scheduling in nature…but then he has broadened his work to cover global supply chain designs, facility networks, supply contracts and multi-party coordination, and the interface between marketing and manufacturing. This is a very ambitious coverage, but Panos was able to produce very high-quality outputs in all these areas.”

“In supply chain risk management, he has worked on the integration of operational hedges and financial hedges. … In supply chain finance, he has worked on the integration of operational and financial decisions, and especially the role of short-term financing of inventories on the efficiency of supply chains. … he is among the few operations management scholars to integrate trade finance instruments … and other hedging devices.”

“I am deeply humbled and honored by this recognition,” Kouvelis said. “I would like to thank the award committee, my professional friends who nominated me, and the MSOM community for giving me an environment of inspiring ideas, intellectual challenges, research rigor standards, and the venues to disseminate my work. I am proud to be a member of the MSOM community, and to have had the opportunity to contribute to the field of operations management research in my own small ways.”

Pictured above: Kouvelis honored at the MSOM conference in Munich in late June 2022.

The one American company that is the most innovative, the most effective at research and development, of the five most attention-grabbing US-based companies isn’t one that’s developing your cellphones, creating your home tech devices or delivering goods to your door.

Rather, it’s one you watch: Netflix.

The 2020 Research Quotient Top 50 (RQ50), highlighting the most innovative US companies, was unveiled September 18 at The Industrial Innovation Path to Economic Recovery Conference hosted by the Boeing Center at Washington University in St Louis.

A recent paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, finds that RQ is the only innovation measure that reliably predicts market returns.  That paper was co-authored by Michael J. Cooper of the University of Utah, Wenhao Yang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and  Anne Marie Knott, the Robert and Barbara Frick Professor in Business at WashU Olin, who pioneered the RQ measure.

The conference attendees, in an online audience poll, predicted Amazon would prevail as the most innovative among the FAANG notables: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet (formerly Google). In addition to unveiling the new list, Knott, at the Boeing Center/Olin conference, oversaw a panel discussion with two “RQ50 Hall of Famers”—firms that have been in the RQ50 for 10 or more years: A.N. Sreeram, Senior vice president and chief technology officer of Dow (20 years in RQ50), and Dr. Clive Meanwell, founder of The Medicines Company (10 years in the RQ50), whose company became ineligible for the RQ50 after being acquired by Novartis last year.

Keys to research investment success

Knott pointed out it was interesting to hear their discussion echo what her RQ scholarship has found: The keys to successful innovation, even in this instance for a 123-year-old company and a biotech startup, are not all that different.

“Keeping secrets is overrated. If you don’t collaborate and share IP, you’re highly unlikely to develop anything of great use.” 

Dr. Clive Meanwell

“How can you build wisdom faster?” asked Sreeram. “Make research available to innovators.”  He noted that every research report conducted at Dow since 1934 is fully digitized and available to researchers at the firm today. Sreeram praised such information sharing as an effective means of facilitating wisdom and learning, even among expert-level professionals. 

The RQ50 session was part of the five-session conference that received national attention after it opened with a fireside chat that Olin Dean Mark P. Taylor hosted with St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard, who characterized the new debt associated with COVID-19 interventions and offered his perspective on lifting inflation. This set the stage for a series of discussions to understand how best to invigorate technological change to spur economic growth sufficient to handle the debt.

Research versus innovation

While many argue this is best accomplished by increasing research, which takes place predominantly at universities and government labs, the conference focused attention on innovation—converting research into products and services that people want to buy. The latter takes place in companies, where 70% of U.S. R&D is conducted.  

Recognizing that companies can’t drive growth themselves, the conference included a panel discussion with three investors known for their long-horizon approach: Michelle Edkins, managing director, BlackRock Investment Stewardship; Penny Pennington, managing partner, Edward Jones; and Jared Woodard, director for global investment strategy, Bank of America. The panel was moderated by Todd Milbourn, vice dean of faculty and research and Hubert C. & Dorothy R. Moog Professor of Finance.

Woodard spoke to the importance of R&D and the RQ metric.

“One of the things that has become incredibly important in a world of low-economic growth, low-interest rates and low profits is the ability to find companies that can use R&D and capex [capital expenditure] dollars efficiently,” Woodard said. “And I think RQ is a great example of one methodology for finding those kinds of firms.”

“We’re always talking to the boards and management of companies about long-term challenges and opportunities and that includes R&D and capex,” Edkins added. “We are seeing COVID-19 accelerate macroeconomic trends key to R&D.”

Pennington mentioned the importance of efficient R&D over long-investing horizons in any environment and the imperative to identify firms whose R&D drives “return on investment in excess of the cost of capital,” characterizing that search as a “fundamental root of serious long-term investing.”

Emerging research on innovation

The conference also included a session of emerging academic research which offered an evidence-base for what innovation strategies and polices work, and which don’t. Participants included: Chad Syverson, University of Chicago, “Product Innovation, Product Diversification,and Firm Growth: Evidence from Japan’s Early Industrialization;” Florian Ederer, Yale School of Management, “Killer Acquisitions;” and Willy Shih, Harvard Business School, “Some Attention to the Demand Side, Please.”

While companies invest 70% of some $580 million invested in US R&D, the government is the next largest source of such funding—22%. In a closing keynote talk, Knott guided a discussion with Jaymie Durnan, director of strategic initiatives at Lincoln Lab, focusing on how those funds could be better spent. Moreover, Durnan discussed what government policies might drive more growth from R&D.

In the end, the audience met in breakout rooms to synthesize insights gleaned across the sessions to generate actionable recommendations to increase growth from innovation and thereby emerge from the pandemic in better shape. These insights and a conference report will be available on the Boeing Center’s LinkedIn page.

In a recent operations management research productivity study published in Decision Sciences, Panos Kouvelis was ranked among the top three in several significant categories. Kouvelis is WashU Olin’s director of The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation and Emerson Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management.

The study includes the “most-published OM authors from across the world based on total number of papers on which the individual is included as author from across all four [major] journals [of the field: Management Science, MSOM, POM, and JOM] over the 15-year period of 2001-2015.”

Here are a few ranking highlights for Professor Kouvelis:

• No. 3: Total number of papers
• No. 1: Publications in MSOM
• No. 3: Total number of papers, weighted for co-authorship (Management Science publications counted only in the OM department)
• No. 2: Total number of papers, weighted for co-authorship (Management Science publications included in all departments, with some OM linkage)

Fuqiang Zhang, the Dan Broida Professor of Operations & Manufacturing Management, ranked No. 39 for total number of papers and No. 36 in papers weighted for co-authorship.

Additionally, Washington University’s Olin OMM department ranked No. 18 for total number of papers carrying an institution’s affiliation in authorship, No. 9 for publications in MSOM, and No. 12 for publications in Management Science.

We congratulate profs. Kouvelis and Zhang, and the Olin Business School OMM department, on these impressive achievements, and wish them the best in continuing their incredibly productive careers in OM research!

Imagine you and your significant other finally carved out some time for a vacation getaway. You did your research—booked flights, picked a few promising restaurants, dug up your favorite fanny pack—and now it’s time to find a place to stay.

You’ve heard a lot about Airbnb, so you decide to give it a try. After some deliberation, you’ve both agreed on a place within walking distance of all the local attractions, so you send a request to the owner.

But after a couple hours, you get a message from Airbnb saying that your request has been denied without explanation. For a significant number of Airbnb users, this scenario is all too real.

In the Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation’s latest video, Dennis Zhang, Olin assistant professor of operations and manufacturing management, discusses the topic of racial discrimination on peer-to-peer platforms.

According to Zhang, Airbnb requests made by accounts with distinctly African American names were 19 percent less likely to be accepted compared to other accounts. However, if those accounts have additional review data (i.e., at least one positive or negative review), all accounts are equally likely to be accepted.

Zhang believes that people require a bit more information to nudge them in a non-discriminatory direction. He thinks that if Airbnb offered more information within the platform, it would reduce the likelihood of discrimination by those looking to rent out their space.

Zhang goes on to mention that platforms conducting business via peer-to-peer transactions face a higher likelihood of discrimination. He says that discovering how discrimination happens on those platforms is a critical step to ensuring equal consumer treatment. Zhang’s research emphasizes the importance of information, and hopes it will be effective in the fight against discrimination.

[RELATED: Airbnb nondiscrimination policy may backfire]

Jorge Calvo, Professor of Operations Strategy at GLOBIS University Management School and former President & CEO of the Global Supply Chain Management Division of Roland DG Systems, recently sat down with the Director of The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation, Panos Kouvelis, to talk about Industry 4.0 and its implications on the future of global manufacturing.

Industry 4.0 was a term coined to describe a program to support the local industry in Germany and France. It is considered to be the fourth major phase of the industrial revolution, characterized by its use of emerging technologies to enhance manufacturing techniques and supply chain processes.

In his experience, Calvo has found that there are two different approaches within the scope of Industry 4.0: the German approach, focusing on machine-to-machine production practices and supply chain management (i.e., the “smart factory” and the Internet of Things), and the Japanese approach, which focuses on cloud-based technology designed for process optimization through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

For more supply chain digital content and cutting-edge research, check us out on the socials [@theboeingcenter] and download our app on iOS or Android for access to exclusive content and events!

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