Batten Institute

One pressing concern for pharmaceutical companies is how to effectively allocate scarce resources across projects in R&D pipelines. Professor Panos Markou shares insights on how competitors’ investments in drugs that treat the same disorder may reveal potentially useful information, which senior executives can use to improve chances of success.

Once the domain of video games, Virtual reality (VR) is playing a growing role in the workplace. Darden Professor Roshni Raveendhran explores how business leaders can leverage VR technologies — in particular, avatars — in frequent monitoring situations.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic, advances in information technology were already fueling the rise of a handful of superstar firms that dominate the economy. COVID-19 has greatly accelerated that trend. Darden Professor Anton Korinek explores the implications of the superstar phenomenon for overall economic efficiency and, by extension, policy.

No event in modern history has driven so much change, so fast, as the coronavirus pandemic. In a world beset by the challenges presented by COVID-19, can we look into the minds of entrepreneurs to discover how businesses and individuals might start to rebuild?

As COVID-19 continues to spread, hospitals in the hardest-hit areas operate at near capacity. Professor Elliott N. Weiss believes that understanding capacity management and other fundamental concepts in operations can help us make sense of the current crisis and invites us to examine it through the lens of operations.

COVID-19 is a disaster for public health and the economy. Yet there may be a glimmer of a silver lining for the natural environment: By year end, the globe may see the biggest dip in carbon emissions on record. Investment in next-generation clean energy now could restore jobs, provide new ones, drive economic growth and lock in environmental gains.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) were already causing unprecedented changes in work and business. Now, the world’s top thinkers on the economics of AI — Daron Acemoğlu, Diane Coyle, and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz — are drawing new lessons from today’s crisis.

While the future has always been unpredictable, the global uncertainty caused by the novel coronavirus is at a record high. To help us steer through this unprecedented crisis, Professor Saras Sarasvathy shares insights on entrepreneurial decision-making and offers four strategies seasoned founders use to turn uncertainty into opportunity.

Does career risk inhibit entrepreneurship? Research from Darden Professor Ting Xu and colleagues shows the effect of leave policies on entrepreneurship and explores the extent to which longer job-protected leave leads to new ventures, creating jobs in industries in which experimentation before entry has low costs and high benefits.

China’s progress towards modernization and marketization gave women unprecedented opportunities to launch and scale private enterprises and make billions in the process. Professor Ming-Jer Chen shares insights on how China managed to forge a new class of super-successful female founders.