Business & Entrepreneurship

Life-changing innovations continue to emerge from the university thanks to creative faculty research, cross-collaboration and the aid of the Office of Technology Management.

Big data is changing the world, but is it for the better? Liberty Vittert, professor of practice in data science at Olin Business School, discusses big data’s even bigger impact.

The rate in which COVID-19 cases spread is not proportionate with the number of contagious individuals – as prior models assumed – but rather concave, meaning that the impact of one more infected person diminishes as more people are infected, according to Olin Business School researchers at Washington University in St. Louis.

Relaxing stay-at-home social and business policies will be accompanied by increases in the infection rate, and the race for a vaccine will lose its value to big Pharma almost with each passing day. Those are the main findings by two economists from Washington University in St. Louis and another from the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, who investigated the properties of the optimal lockdown policy.

Registration for Equalize 2020, a first-of-its-kind pitch competition designed to showcase female faculty startup founders, is underway. The event takes place June 25 via Zoom.

The U.S. sports blackout because of the pandemic has left at least a $12 billion crater in the national economy. And even if stadiums and arenas light up anew soon, they won’t look the same. A sports business expert from the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis doesn’t expect the NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball to welcome fans if/when they return in 2020, for example.

During this critical transition as local economies are reopening, an organizational strategy expert at Washington University in St. Louis says businesses must be thinking about the appropriate mix of defense and offense if they are going to succeed in the long game.  

If the post-pandemic economic return includes minimum-wage increases across a few or many states, research led by Washington University in St. Louis scientists in the Olin Business School suggests that some positive and negative effects for U.S. workers follow in the two years after implementation.

Washington University junior Ayana Klein, founder of edtech startup 3DuxDesign, shares her story as a student entrepreneur and how WashU led her to success.

The coronavirus pandemic has shattered and shuttered businesses. As businesses gradually continue to reopen across the United States, three Olin Business School experts at Washington University in St. Louis offer insights into potential opportunities that could help businesses to emerge from the economic storm.