Operations & technology

Facebook’s recent announcement to rebrand the company as Meta brought the concept of the metaverse to a much wider audience. Does this emerging digital space represent the next-generation landscape in which millions will work and play?

Professor Doug Thomas discusses supply chain and argues that executives’ focus must shift to balance the historical commitment to efficiency with a renewed commitment to resiliency.

Mining activities support the functioning of society but their benefits are usually seen far from the area of extraction. One public-private partnership leverages the value chain to strengthen the economic ecosystem in resource extraction communities, focusing on both responsible production and creating opportunities for women and young people.

Does “waiting in line” need translation, or do all cultures view a wait as undesirable? It turns out there’s cultural nuance to queueing, according to Darden Professor Elliott N. Weiss and colleagues Graham Gillam, Kyle Simmons and Donald Stevenson.

A Matter of Strategy: The laptop industry is competitive, and the product is highly available and highly interchangeable. Faced with unfavorable market dynamics, how did Apple carve out its niche among laptop makers? What implications are there for other organizations and industries? The answers lie in a capacity to rewrite the playbook.

With the help of a predictive machine-learning algorithm, Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne offers new hope for beleaguered airport passengers changing planes. Implemented at Heathrow Airport, the system is a game changer for management, demonstrating how industries can use data to save millions in costly overstaffing and dissatisfied customers.

Waiting in line is no one’s favorite thing, but the circumstances in which they people themselves queued up play a huge role in how they experience the delay, according to Professor Elliott N. Weiss. To raise customer satisfaction, retailers can keep in mind three important E’s: Eliminate the wait, manage Expectations and Enhance the experience.

Lean principles have helped successful companies optimize operations and eliminate inefficiencies. Used as a tool, the methodology can create significant value for multiple stakeholders, including consumers. But the COVID-19 pandemic brought into stark relief the vulnerability of food supply chains in major shocks.

Design Thinking, Agile and Lean are ways of innovating that focus on building products and services that create customer value and take the risk out of development and delivery processes. But each method has a specific focus and combination of tools, as well as suitability for different projects.

David Touve, senior director at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business Batten Institute, recently answered five questions on Section 230, the controversial law that many say helped create the internet as we know it.