Business & Entrepreneurship

Dan Senor, co-author of Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, who was originally scheduled to appear on the Assembly Series on February 2, will give his talk at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 3. The event will be held at Graham Chapel on the Danforth Campus of Washington University. The event is free […]

If the titans of finance had only been paying attention, they would have seen that former Washington University in St. Louis economics professor Hyman P. Minsky had predicted the Great Recession decades before it happened.

Proposals ranging from sharing electricity savings with lab users to allowing students to bid on how much electricity they can save are among the ideas that students suggested in the Olin Sustainability Case Competition. The winner gets $5,000 cash and a meeting to present her proposal to the chancellor and other top administrators.

Seven finalists were selected Feb. 10 from a field of 45 to compete for $100,000 in grants in April at the 2011 YouthBridge Social Enterprise and Innovation Competition (SEIC) offered by the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Hillary A. Sale, JD, the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law and Professor of Management at Washington University in St. Louis, organized this year’s DirectWomen Board Institute, an annual national program designed to develop and position an elite group of exceptional senior women lawyers for service as directors of major U.S. corporations. The institute is being held this week, Feb. 9-11, in New York City.

Anyone who cares about the rule of law has to acknowledge that illegal immigration has serious social costs that cannot be casually dismissed, says immigration law expert Stephen Legomsky, JD, DPhil, the John S. Lehmann University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “When millions of individuals violate any law — whether it’s immigration, taxes or exceeding the posted speed limit — the rule of law takes a hit. But sometimes, mass violations reveal flaws in the law itself. At any rate, the rule of law also means that the penalties should not be disproportionate to the wrongdoing.”

Washington University engineering students Nalin Katta and Matthew MacEwan, who also is a School of Medicine student, won the Olin Cup business plan competition Feb. 3 and $50,000 in seed investment for an invention that can replace the protective covering of the brain. With 49 entrants, this year’s competition was the largest group of ventures yet.

Commercials during the Super Bowl may be some of the most watched ads on broadcast T.V., but Olin marketing professors say social media has changed the game. Advertisers need to engage the audience before, during and after the game with strategies that include everything from smartphones to Twitter.

Laura Rosenbury, JD, associate dean for research and faculty development and professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, has been elected to the American Law Institute (ALI), a national independent organization that focuses on producing scholarly work to clarify and modernize the law. Membership in the ALI is based on professional achievement and a demonstrated interest in improving the law.

Yvonne Sparks, senior manager of community development for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, delivers the keynote address for the fifth annual “Financial Freedom Seminar: Recovering From the Recession, Reaching for the Future,” on Jan. 22, in Brown Hall. The Society of Black Student Social Workers at the Brown School hosted the seminar in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.