Early results of an experiment at The Gap provide hope that there might be a remedy for one of the most controversial labor practices in retailing, hospitality, health care, call centers, and many other service industries: schedules that require employees to work different shifts every week, often with only three days’ notice of next week’s schedule. These volatile schedules can wreak havoc with workers’ child-care arrangements, school classes, and other personal responsibilities.
On Nov. 1-2, leading practitioners and top researchers from around the world joined together at the tenth annual Private Equity Research Consortium (PERC) Symposium in Chapel Hill, NC. Hosted by the Institute for Private Capital, an affiliated center of the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, the conference has established a reputation as leading the discussion between leading academics and practitioners in the private capital arena. This year’s symposium not only unveiled the latest research insights, but also served as an occasion to look back at ten years of achievements and successes.
The third annual invitation-only Frontiers of Entrepreneurship conference, hosted by the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and its affiliated Entrepreneurship Center, will gather a highly curated group of 150 leaders from academia, industry and government to discuss leading-edge research on private business ventures and explore ways to sustain and advance entrepreneurship.
NCGrowth develops a web-based tool that helps connect communities with information and inspiration.
The dynamic procurement problem has long attracted academic and practitioner interest, and we solve it in an innovative data-driven way with proven theoretical guarantees. This work is also the first to leverage the power of covariate data in solving this problem.
Markets today are flooded with an increasing number of products and brands, making it difficult for companies to track how their products compete in the market. In this article, the authors describe how they used clickstream data to visualize competition in product categories containing more than 1,000 products.
This article integrates relevant literature to develop a conceptual model on the potential avenues to achieve service excellence at low unit costs, which we term cost-effective service excellence (CESE). To gain a deeper understanding of these strategies, their applicability and interrelatedness, we analyze how 10 organizations have achieved CESE. Our findings show that CESE can be achieved through three core strategies.
On January 31 and February 1, 2019, the Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise (Kenan Institute) hosted its Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Conference at The Breakers Palm Beach Resort. The conference brought together more than 150 academic research scholars, policy experts and private sector professionals to discuss and debate the most challenging current issues in the field of entrepreneurship in order to set the agenda for future research and policy.
The debate surrounding returns of private equity vs. public markets continues with a recent paper by AQR. What do the latest data tell us?
In many service operations, customers have repeated interactions with service providers. This creates two important questions for service design. First, how important is it to maintain the continuity of service for individuals? Second, since maintaining continuity is costly and, at times, operationally impractical for both the organization (due to potentially lower utilization) and providers (due to high effort required), should certain customer types, such as those with complex needs, be prioritized for continuity?
We study how the government of a developing country optimizes its local content requirement (LCR) policy to maximize social welfare in a setting where foreign original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) produce and sell multicomponent products in the developing country. The foreign OEMs’ local sourcing of components is more costly than global sourcing because of technology gaps between local and global suppliers.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues continue to grow in importance, and companies are facing unprecedented internal and external criticism and pressures to address them.
Reeves Moseley, a political science and public policy double major with a minor in business, has always had a keen interest in public service. This past April, he had the opportunity to lobby on Capitol Hill with 80 other college students chosen to represent the Fraternal Government Relations Coalition.
Reeves Moseley, a political science and public policy double major with a minor in business, has always had a keen interest in public service. This past April, he had the opportunity to lobby on Capitol Hill with 80 other college students chosen to represent the Fraternal Government Relations Coalition.
On June 5-7, more than 80 of the world’s leading business school researchers, policymakers and practitioners of corporate sustainability convened at the Kenan Center for the 11th annual conference for the Alliance for Research on Corporate Responsibility (ARCS). The event attracted attendees from North and South America, Asia and Europe, from management, law, public policy, operations and economics.
Gentrifying cities increasingly are adopting inclusive and equitable development policies, strategies, tools, and regulatory practices to minimize, if not altogether eliminate, the demographic and economic dislocations that often accompany their growing attractiveness as ideal places to live, work, and play for a creative class of young people and well-resourced retirees who are predominantly white. Creating greater opportunities for historically under-utilized businesses to grow and prosper through enhanced local government contracting and procurement is one mechanism through which gentrifying cities are trying to generate greater equity and shared prosperity.
The autonomous car began as an opportunity that required breaking all kinds of limits: engineering, navigation, adjusting to traffic conditions, distinguishing objects, predicting what those objects might do, reacting in time, calculating quickly and juggling a vast number of ever-changing variables. The developers used more and more computer power to address these needs. But the initial bounding limit turned out to be very fundamental; rule-based computers don’t have pattern power.
Real Estate investments continue to rise in importance in the alternative asset space. But much is still to be learned about their value and performance.
Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically. This article introduces an empirical way to identify patent races, and provides the first broad-based view of them in the real world.
In honor of University Research Week, Kenan Institute Director of Research Christian Lundblad discusses the importance of research from the perspective of Kenan-Flagler faculty, and how the school's international reputation is inextricably tied to the quality, relevance and creativity of its collective research agenda.