Stories Archives

Private: Award-Winning Sanitation Startup revoLOOtion Solves a Basic Need

A child girl plays in piles of trash while her mother burns it on the beach of Kollam, Kerala

Chances are most Wharton students take basic sanitation for granted. Not Nidhi Shah, G’17, WG’17, who confronted enough problems with sewage in her native India to become a waste warrior. The result? RevoLOOtion, a startup on a mission to change the way the world does sanitation, making it more sustainable,…Read More

Helping Cities Go With the Flow

Excavator helps to eliminate the problem of breaking a pipe in the street on a hot summer day

Water utilities lose $14 billion every year from leaks, faulty meters, and water theft. These challenges, coupled with a lack of government infrastructure investment, have kept water and sewer costs rising at a rate beyond average income growth and inflation. Increasing costs and public pushback are forcing utilities to move beyond traditional practices to keep pace and open the door for private-sector solutions — like those springing forth from Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship.…Read More

From Farm to Market More Efficiently

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

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