Olin Business School

The field in the 2010 Olin Cup business plan competition was narrowed Nov. 18 as 21 semifinalists faced off in the elevator pitch stage of the race for entrepreneurs at Washington University in St. Louis. Six ventures were selected to advance to the final round of the annual contest that will award $75,000 to the most promising enterprise in February 2011.

Before Google became a household word, engineers like Anna Patterson (EN ’87, EN ’87) were figuring out how to search the Internet and find the most relevant answers to random queries. The director of Google Research returns to campus at 8 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 18, as guest speaker co-sponsored by Olin Business School and the School of Engineering & Applied Science. She will talk about her experience in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and member of the Google team.

Events to spark innovation, imagination and creativity are taking place on the WUSTL campus and around the world from Nov. 15-20 as part of a global initiative to promote entrepreneurship among young people. Got an idea? Learn how to turn it into a venture. Participate in an amazing race to discover innovative ventures in St. Louis or listen to other entrepreneurs as they bounce their ideas off a panel of judges.

Entrepreneurs armed with phone apps, robots and internet-based tools for teaching and organizing are among the semi-finalists in this year’s Olin Cup business plan competition.  Tattoos that fade away after a few months, composting systems and a family-oriented weight loss program are among the innovative ideas vying for investors and prize money. 

Halloween candy is a treat for many children, but for those forced to work on cocoa farms in west Africa it’s a mean and tortuous trick. Two WUSTL professors call attention to the hidden horrors of cocoa production — the base ingredient in chocolate — in an op-ed piece published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Todd T. Milbourn, PhD, was installed as the Hubert C. and Dorothy R. Moog Professor of finance Sept. 29 in a ceremony at the Charles F. Knight Executive Education and Conference Center. Milbourn, who joined the Olin Business School faculty 10 years ago, is the second to receive this title; the inaugural professorship was held by Nicholas Dopuch, PhD, currently Moog professor emeritus of accounting.

Managers and CEOs: are you ready for your close-up? A new book by Jackson Nickerson, PhD, the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy at Olin Business School, advocates the use of video for communicating from the corner office to employees throughout a business. Nickerson’s book is published by the Brookings Institution Press and will be the first in a series by Olin professors called Innovations in Leadership. 

Ready, aim your smartphone and read! The new issue of Olin Business magazine is sporting a high tech code on its cover that lets readers connect immediately to the school’s website.  Innovation and creative thinking are themes in the magazine as well as daily activities at Washington University’s top ranked business school.

The Weston Career Center at Olin Business School is not sitting on the sideline, waiting for the economy to recover, campus recruiting to pick up and unemployment to drop. Instead, the career center team has gone on the offensive to help students find jobs in non-traditional markets and help them learn how to market themselves and network in new ways. 

Lingxiu Dong, PhD, professor of operations and manufacturing management at Olin Business School, is passionate about making a difference in real-world business practices. Her research seeks solutions to problems managers face when juggling all the links in complicated supply chains.