AACSB is a global nonprofit alliance of business schools organized to improve the quality and impact of business education globally by issuing accreditation based on specific standards focused specifically on leadership. A Continuous Improvement Review (CIR) is required every five years, along with a peer-reviewed on-campus assessment including meetings with departments, faculty, students. The SC Johnson College of Business is proud to participate in this process, and our site visit took place last week. To say the very least, it was stimulating.

This was already a privileged opportunity to get trusted eyes on our work (our Peer Review Team was led by fellow deans Geoff Garrett of USC’s Marshall School of Business and Lillian Mills of UT McCombs School of Business). But the very process of planning the visit proved an excellent year-long exercise; creating the best-considered survey and tour of our world opened our eyes to successes, challenges, and priorities. All of this made for a very full two-and-a-half days. We will learn of the results of the CIR very soon. But this progress is what I want to share here.

Continuous improvement at building a college, living our values

The AACSB affiliation provides a framework that is terrifically healthy for this young college with grand legacies in our three schools. Since 2016, working with the Cornell University Provost’s office, our mission has been to build this college up (our 10-year-anniversary is coming in 2026). We started with the finest foundation and are now focused on harnessing our great energies. Revision is, of course, necessary along the way. AACSB re-articulated its standards in 2020, and we reinforced our own strategic plan in 2021 to guide future growth and development defined by the guiding principles of the positive societal impact of business, continuous improvement, collegiality, and ever-greater inclusivity and belonging. “Building a college, living our values” became our rallying cry.

Since our last CIR in 2019, we have made real progress to share in the report and during our site visit. What did we showcase? Within our walls, our hiring process was significantly revamped. We elevated faculty hiring to the College level from a school-by-school method, and implemented “cluster hiring” in which academic area groups are leaders in faculty recruitment. Across our searches, we saw an 80-100% increase in the depth of the applicant pools for our various positions (and this in a climate of decreasing numbers of business PhDs around the world). We have also harmonized the tenure clock across the College, encouraging cross-school teaching to build attractive loads for prospective new faculty. The recruits appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with so many more colleagues in their respective disciplinary areas. The role of our Dean of Faculty and Research has been strengthened as well, and this is feeding the College’s collaborative identity and culture. Fortified by these developments in our College, our overall research productivity is outstanding, measured in terms of publications in the top peer-reviewed journals in business and management and in terms of their visibility to the outside world. The AACSB review team praised us on these critical dimensions.

Across the university, we see a growing demand for business curriculum, with strong registration for our various business minors, reliance on College business courses in developing new online undergraduate programming, and large numbers of undergraduate transfers into the College from within Cornell — only some of which we can accommodate. This increasing reliance on our college to deliver on university priorities is a responsibility that comes with its own challenges. Strategies are being developed to make the most of this growth.

Did we discover room for improvement? You bet!

Our College’s complex organizational structure, the growing pains of a relatively young organization, and our geographic diversity (programs all over Cornell’s campuses and in China, Vietnam, Rwanda, Japan, Latin America, and more) present a unique set of circumstances. The College must continue to define and build a culture and visibility as a College — especially in light of our upcoming 10th anniversary and the opportunities for celebration, visibility, and brand awareness. Our AACSB Peer Review Team saw our centrality on campus in Ithaca and on Roosevelt Island as a natural advantage and advised us to reach out more to our Cornell peers to build new partnerships. They stressed that we, as an elite comprehensive business college, can and should show other business schools around the world the way forward in building the most relevant form of business education. I loved hearing this guidance.

The team could not have been more encouraging, although one of our tremendous successes came with a bit of a slap on the wrist: while tremendously impressed with our faculty’s published research in various areas, (they saw us as distinct leaders in research on corporate sustainability, climate finance and applied AI) they were not at all thrilled with our communications about this impactful work. So a big theme of our meetings with was about enhancing the visibility of this vital work internally and to the world.

Point taken. Our faculty are literally exploding with publications on every aspect of the societal impact of business. We do publish the annual Research With Impact report (the 2023 edition is coming next month), but once a year is clearly not often enough. We need more mechanisms for amplifying the work. One PRT dean does a monthly push of a forthcoming or recently published paper in a digestible form to faculty colleagues, which they can showcase in their own classes, and perhaps to other deans on campus who should know more about the work we do. This is an excellent suggestion, which we’re exploring. I’ve also decided to adopt a new habit of featuring recently-accepted work here in the blog. Read on!

Spotlight on Faculty Research: The origins of clean energy innovation in the energy inventor’s career

What a great prompt to start with Todd Gerarden’s recent work with Eugenie Dugoua of the LSE. Their paper “Induced Innovation, Inventors, and the Energy Transition” has been accepted for publication in the American Economic Review: Insights, a top outlet for articles with perspectives on the marketplace. Studying how individual inventors respond to incentives to work on “clean” electricity technologies, the authors shed light on the origins of clean energy innovation through the careers of individual inventors working on electricity generation technologies.

Here’s a quote from their introduction:
“A vast body of research in economics underscores the pivotal role of human capital in the innovation process. However, the role of individual scientists and inventors in the energy sector has received relatively little attention from economists. What is the evolution of a typical energy inventor’s career? Given the extensive training required to reach the frontier of specialized fields, are inventors likely to shift their research focus from conventional fossil fuel technologies to emerging clean technologies? What is the role of new entrants relative to incumbents? Addressing these questions is vital to understanding and influencing the pace of future clean energy innovation.”

Todd’s article gauges the arc of a typical energy inventor’s career from dirty to clean energy invention using natural gas price variation as a forcing function. They exploit comprehensive global data on patent applications by classifying them as either “clean,” “grey,” or “dirty” electricity technologies (a scheme which itself is a contribution of the paper). From this analysis, two new stylized facts about energy inventors emerge. First, evidently most inventors specialize in either clean or dirty technologies, a finding that raises questions for me about future policies to encourage a shift from dirty to clean tech. And, second, about half of the clean patent families in the data came from inventors who had not patented before in clean, highlighting the crucial role of new entrants in clean innovation. Transitions in the career paths of these inventors is the headline.

Dugoua and Gerarden remind us that the clean energy innovation is critical to reducing the costs of climate change mitigation and allowing society to avert the worst-case scenarios projected by climate scientists. A great paper on an important, timely topic, which I encourage all to pick up and read.

And I couldn’t leave without mentioning:
• AI meets the SDGs: AACSB published a great feature on the SDG Dashboard developed by faculty at St Joseph’s University Haub School of Business. This generative AI tool, affectionately called ChatSDG, identifies the alignment of research with one or more of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I suspect that the Gerarden article would score very high on SDG alignment in ChatSDG. We know that the Financial Times is going to create a new stand-alone research ranking for business schools for the Fall, and that they are working with such tools to help identify which articles in which journals, published by faculty of which schools are most societally relevant.

• Big congratulations are owed to our own Professor Bob Libby who was honored by his peers by selection into the Accounting Hall of Fame!

• And, finally, what a wonderful celebration at the 2024 Big Red Bash at the Tribeca 360 rooftop this week. I was there with Dean Vishal Gaur and nearly 250 alumni gathered to honor a number of our wonderful alumni. Among the College’s “10 Under 10” awardees, we recognized: Raj Davé ’13, MBA ’18, CFO and cofounder of Scalable Care, a San Francisco-based AI healthcare platform; Shawn Driver, MBA ’19, a strategic industry engagements lead at Army Futures Command in Austin, Texas; Marianne Boak, MBA ’23, senior vice president of enterprise products and data operations at Major League Baseball; and, Chris Marino, MBA ’20, at Google Customer Solutions, where he oversees a team responsible for growing a multibillion-dollar portfolio with C-Level media agency executives to drive digital transformation at scale. Marques Zak, MBA ’10, was recognized as the Robert J. Swieringa Service Award winner, which recognizes extraordinary alumni who have graduated within the past 20 years for their exemplary commitment to the Johnson School community. Barry Ridings, MBA ’76, received the Samuel C. Johnson Distinguished Service Award for a lifetime achievement award that recognizes extraordinary individuals for their sustained and exemplary commitment to Johnson and its alumni. Anne Chow, BS ’88, MEng ’89, MBA ’90 won the L. Joseph Thomas Leadership Award is a lifetime achievement award that recognizes alumni for their exceptional demonstration of vision and leadership. Congratulations all!