When it comes to agriculture, weather isn’t all that’s dicey. Farmers need accurate counts of the produce in their fields to determine pricing, negotiate contracts with buyers, and maintain the overall financial health and success of their farms. But precise crop estimation techniques are expensive to execute because they entail high labor costs, while more efficient estimating techniques are often inaccurate.…Read More
Stories
Are Leaders Born … or Made?
Strong, effective leadership is indispensable to the success of any organization. Large corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, educational institutions — all recognize the difference good leaders make and know the challenges that arise from leadership vacuums. Yet a longstanding debate has questioned whether great leaders are simply born or whether they can be taught.…Read More
Successful M&A evaluation includes PE and emerging global markets
Thinking of growing your company via a merger or an acquisition? It’s important for strategic buyers to understand what’s shaping the market and the competitive environment when making such decisions. And it’s just as critical, says Wharton finance professor Robert Holthausen, to consider two external forces at work in today’s M&A market: cross-border activity, and the role of private equity.…Read More
Countdown to the Real World
The mission of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative has always been to bridge the gap between academia and industry. Last fall, Wharton marketing professors and WCAI co-directors Eric Bradlow and Raghu Iyengar were determined to find a way to engage more deeply with companies while providing students with opportunities to immerse themselves in real-world data and business contexts via a “learning by doing” approach. Just to up the ante, they set a project time limit of one month.…Read More
Bridging the Gap Between Business and Technology Through Data Analytics
Companies across a variety of industries are currently spending millions of dollars on data-gathering initiatives — but few are successfully capitalizing on all this data to generate revenue. Indeed, moving from customer data collection to analysis to profitable financial results requires three things:…Read More
Small Business Grows Up
Wharton is collaborating with business leaders and entrepreneurs in ways that give birth to the world’s next great companies, driving significant economic growth and creating jobs. A leading program out of Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship, the Wharton Small Business Development Center (WSBDC), works to cultivate an entrepreneurial ecosystem that gives students and alumni the knowledge, experience, and networks to scale big ideas into sustainable impact.…Read More
Analyze New Forms of Data Through Neuroscience
When the time-traveling orbital observatory known as the James Webb Space Telescope reaches its orbit around the Earth (which NASA hopes will happen sometime in mid-2019), it will radically increase how far we can peer into the past, and, scientists hope, unlock some of the greatest mysteries of our universe.…Read More
How Sovereign Wealth Funds Can Make the Most of Private Equity
Sovereign wealth fund managers must be increasingly adept when adjusting their investments.…Read More
Startup Challenge Semifinalist: AgGrow
Team Leader: Wei-Yin Ko, GEN’18 Team Members: George Bumgardner Ben Rhodes Elevator pitch: AgGrow seeks to become the premier marketplace for structured data in agriculture by providing free yield estimation through technology already used by farmers. Where did the idea for your venture come from? The idea came through an…Read More
Startup Challenge Semifinalist: RevoLOOtion
Nidhi Shah, WG' 17 Team Member: Swathi Sadagopan elevator pitch: RevoLOOtion provides rapid-drying, composting toilets to lower middle class urban families in high density informal settlements that currently rely on unhygienic and poorly lit shared latrines. Where did the idea for your venture come from? Both the founders have had bad…Read More