Olin Business School

The nation’s top 20 public firms could have added nearly $1 trillion to their market value if, in 2010, they had used a new tool, known as the research quotient (RQ), to determine their research and development (R&D) budgets, says its creator, Anne Marie Knott, PhD, associate professor of strategy at Washington University in St. Louis.

Olin Business School recognized the achievements of four alumni during the annual Distinguished Alumni Awards Ceremony April 5. They are: Scott B. Helm, Paul A. Koch, Roger L. Koch and Merry L. Mosbacher. Also presented was the Dean’s Medal to Joanne and Charles F. Knight and Carol and George Bauer.

Winners of the seventh annual YouthBridge Social Enterprise and Innovation Competition were announced April 11. Winning teams represented community and WUSTL social entrepreneurs, including students, alumni and faculty. Their social venture ideas ranged from teaching teens about entrepreneurship through beekeeping to providing education to kidney transplant patients.

Kurt Dirks, PhD, Bank of America Professor of Managerial Leadership at Olin Business School, discusses trust in the workplace. “It’s particularly timely,” he says, “given that trust in leaders of almost all sectors ranging from business to government to education are at record lows.”

The Jump Start our Business Start-ups (JOBS) Act, an entrepreneurship bill signed into law April 5 by President Barack Obama, could help open an entirely new class of investor to a process they largely have been held out of, says an expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

In a down economy where advertisers are concerned about every dollar spent, a team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a new method of measuring the effectiveness of Google search advertising, taking into account not only online sales, but goods or services purchased off-line as well.

Richard M. Frankel, PhD, was installed March 21 as the Beverly and James Hance Professor of Accounting at Washington University in St. Louis. Frankel joined Olin Business School in 2005 as associate professor of accounting and is an expert in financial accounting, which provides information to individuals outside a firm.

With the cost of filing for bankruptcy going up, many cash-strapped American families are using their tax rebate to pay for it, finds a new study by Jialan Wang, PhD, assistant professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School. The study is published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Wang and colleagues at Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

Washington University in St. Louis students interested in a unique summer internship experience as a “mini-CEO” at Answers.com in St. Louis are invited to attend a Career Center event at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 29 in the lower level of Mallinckrodt Center.

Yossi Aviv, PhD, was installed March 5 as the Dan Broida Professor of Operations & Manufacturing Management at Olin Business School. The professorship was established in 1984 by Roma Broida Wittcoff, an alumna and trustee emeritus of Washington University in St. Louis, in memory of her first husband, Daniel Broida, who died in 1981.