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Copyright: © 2013 The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Helen Greiner shares a key trait with many successful business leaders -- a passion for something. In her case it happens to be robots. That passion led Greiner -- along with Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks -- to found what would become iRobot in 1990. Over the past four years iRobot has sold more than 1.5 million robots for cleaning floors and has deployed more than 300 tactical military robots in Iraq. Greiner recently gave a presentation at Wharton sponsored by the School’s entrepreneurship and technology clubs after which she talked with Knowledge at Wharton about her company and the impact that robots have and will have on our everyday lives.
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It’s open season on the television industry’s business model. In recent years the three pillars of the industry’s profits -- advertising regional programming and syndication deals -- have come under fire from a band of technology companies including Sling Media TiVo Orb Networks and Apple Computer that are rewriting the content distribution rules. As one Wharton professor notes TV won’t necessarily be viewed via TV anymore. What are the dangers and opportunities of digital distribution? How easily can the big media companies adapt to new technologies and can they continue to attract viewers who spend more time these days on the web than with their remote controls?
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When Google announced its Gmail email service two years ago a lot of people figured the company was joking. After all Google had been known to offer up the occasional gag like saying it was starting a research center on the moon. More importantly nobody believed that consumers would tolerate Google’s plan of scanning people’s emails and then delivering advertisements to them based on the emails’ contents. Two years later Gmail has tens of millions of users. But consumers’ initial disbelief underscores the web’s knotty privacy problem according to participants at the recent 2006 Wharton Technology Conference. Consumers say they want privacy online although they often behave in ways that contradict that statement; companies insist they will protect privacy although they sometimes fail to do so. And everybody is wary of increased government regulation.
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Online communities have become not just a major social force but a significant driver of business activity both online and offline. Facilitating nurturing and benefiting from those communities however is not a simple task. To explore what makes these communities tick Kevin Werbach a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton spoke with Craig Newmark founder of Craigslist.com Julie Herendeen vice president of Network Products at Yahoo and William Flitter CMO of Pheedo.
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Springtime in addition to bringing back flowers and birds also brings forth many companies’ proxy statements including information on CEO compensation. It’s a signal for the business press to get to work reporting the details of what appear to be the highest executive pay packages. Wharton accounting professors Wayne Guay and John Core and Stanford accounting professor David Larcker also study executive compensation. What they conclude from their most recent research is that the most relevant information doesn’t necessarily make headlines. They also find that in general the media’s focus on excessive compensation does not substantively change corporate behavior with regards to pay packages.
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Different points on the research spectrum were under the microscope at the Wharton Health Care Business Conference last month as two panels of biotech pharmaceutical and investment leaders discussed the state of R&D among big pharmaceuticals and the progress of stem cell research. While disappointing results in both sectors have dominated the news lately panelists at each session also noted some promising developments -- and causes for optimism -- in their respective fields.
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The recent sale of Knight Ridder the country’s second-largest newspaper chain to McClatchy follows one of the most difficult years the industry has had -- declining circulation job losses and falling stock prices. Newspapers it would seem have two big strikes against them: They are in a mature industry and they are a textbook example (stockbrokers are another) of an intermediary between sources of information and customers -- a role that is being increasingly challenged by the Internet. To remain competitive in the coming years say Wharton faculty and others daily newspapers will have to strengthen their efforts to attract younger readers make more imaginative use of the Internet and develop stories mostly local in nature that better meet the needs of time-pressed subscribers.
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Although Microsoft recently unveiled an ’ultra-mobile personal computer ’ or UMPC in a move to fill a market niche between laptops and handheld computers it remains to be seen whether this latest innovation from the software giant will be a hit or flop. While Microsoft is following a ”build-it-and-it-will-sell” strategy with the UMPC technology history is littered with innovative products that never found a market say experts at Wharton. As Wharton professor of operations and information management Eric K. Clemons puts it: ”Build-it-and-it-will-sell strategies are a mixed bag.”
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Consumers these days swim in an alphabet soup of digital devices -- PCs and PDAs DVRs and iPods MP3 and DVD players. And each device delivers a host of programming that is not easily enjoyed on the others. This diversity means that market power will continue to reside with firms that can help consumers find and organize content for their preferred device -- in other words search engines according to panelists at the 2006 Wharton Technology Conference. Discussion centered on increasing advertising opportunities that will accompany improved search engines the development of local and enterprise search and the need for standard data-storage and transfer formats.
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Five years ago this winter California’s wholesale power market imploded. Power prices soared. California residents endured weeks of rolling blackouts. Two California utilities were forced into bankruptcy even as their suppliers -- independent power companies -- reaped huge windfalls. Five years later the tables have turned. Formerly bankrupt California utilities are profitable while formerly robust power generators scramble to survive. What happened? Wharton faculty and others look at the industry’s unique challenges and suggest structural and management strategies that could improve its chances for sustainable growth.
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