A Freeman School-based venture with a plan to turn algae into crude oil was one of the big winners at the 2012 Tulane Business Plan Competition. ReactWell, developer of a patent-pending technology that uses underground geothermal reactors to convert biomass into synthetic crude oil, earned the top prize at the second annual Domain Companies New Orleans Entrepreneur Challenge.
The Freeman School honored Jerry M. Greenbaum (BBA ’62) as Tulane Distinguished Entrepreneur of the Year and Jay Altman as Tulane Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2012 Tulane Council of Entrepreneurs Award Gala, which took place in April at the Audubon Tea Room.
John Elstrott’s name has been synonymous with entrepreneurship education at the Freeman School for more than 25 years. Now, thanks to a California-based company, Elstrott’s name is synonymous with education in rural India as well.
If there was an overriding theme at this year’s Burkenroad Symposium, “Taming the Dragon: The Ethics of Doing Business in the World of Social Media,” panelist David Vinjamuri summed it up best. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” said Vinjamuri, founder of ThirdWay Brand Trainers and “Brand Truth” columnist for Forbes magazine. “There are many things that are perfectly legal and not at all ethical.”
Shaun Budnik, Manny Fernandez, Cheryl Hollander Goldstein (BSM ’84) and Dave Wilson, four business and civic leaders with long, distinguished careers, are the latest additions to the Business School Council, the advisory board of the A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, spoke to Tulane students, faculty and guests on April 9 in an appearance sponsored by the Freeman School. Dimon, whose wife, Judy (N ’78), is a Tulane graduate, discussed the role of banks, the role of corporate America and the nation’s economic future in addition to answering questions from students.
Working with family-owned firms in New Orleans over the past few years, I started hearing stories about the days, months and years after Katrina and how these firms maintained continuity and restructured in response to the disaster. These stories differed significantly from those I heard from non-family firms, and they led me to conduct a formal academic study comparing the two groups.
Carmen Weigelt, assistant professor of management, recently had her paper “Implications of Internal Organization Structure for Firm Boundaries,” co-authored with Doug Miller, accepted for publication in Strategic Management Journal.
Michael T. Yest, professor of practice in finance, received the James T. Murphy Teaching Excellence Award in May at the Freeman School’s Graduate Diploma Ceremony.
Studies have shown fast-food calorie postings do little to deter diners from overeating. A better approach may be for restaurants to simply ask consumers if they’d like smaller portions, according to new research by Janet Schwartz, assistant professor of marketing at the Freeman School.
On a recent Friday morning, about a dozen undergraduate students gathered in a computer lab in the business school where they were directed to a website and asked to make various choices—everything from what to order for dessert to whether to go to a restaurant advertising a special to which NFL replica jersey to buy. It may sound like an online shopping session, but in fact the students were participating in behavioral experiments designed to help researchers at the Freeman School better understand the complexities of consumer decision-making processes.
The A. B. Freeman School of Business gratefully acknowledges in the following pages those individuals and corporations, foundations, and nonprofit organizations that made gifts to the school in fiscal year 2012 (July 1, 2011–June 30, 2012).
The A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University has added six new tenured and tenuretrack professors to its faculty for 2012-13. Of the six appointments, three are for newly created positions, representing the first phase of an ambitious three-year faculty hiring plan initiated last year that will increase the size of the Freeman School’s research-active faculty by almost 40 percent.
The Freeman School’s current faculty recruiting initiative seeks not only to bring the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty back to where it was prior to Hurricane Katrina but to boldly reposition the Freeman School to compete in a rapidly changing educational environment.
