Georgia Institute of Technology is wielding an
increasing impact in the field of Economics &
Business, having achieved the highest percent increase
in total citations in this field according to a recent
analysis of Essential
Science Indicators from
Thomson
Scientific. Georgia Tech’s current
citation record in Economics & Business includes
338 papers cited a total of 2,278 times to date.
Below, representatives of the Georgia Tech College
of Management talk to ScienceWatch.com
about the school’s history and citation
achievements.
The intersection of business and technology has always been at the heart of
Georgia Tech’s College of Management. Our nationally ranked business
school teaches students how to take advantage of the many business
opportunities made possible by emerging technologies and how to succeed in
an increasingly global economy.
The College of Management’s roots date back to 1912, when Georgia
Institute of Technology began providing business education to students. By
1934, the business program was known as Industrial Management and focused
on training students to manage in technical environments. In 1969, the
School of Industrial Management became the College of Industrial
Management. Since 1999, it has been known as the College of Management.
2003 marked the start of an exciting new era for the College. That year the
College moved into its new home in Technology Square, a development at the
heart of Atlanta’s high-tech business community in booming Midtown.
Technology Square includes the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center,
other educational and economic-development centers, and popular restaurant
and retail establishments.
"The intersection of business and
technology has always been at the heart of Georgia
Tech’s College of Management."
The College’s state-of-the-art, 189,000-square-foot building ensures
that students have access to all the latest learning tools and enables them
to attend classes just around the corner from companies where they find
fulfilling and challenging internships, co-op jobs, and careers.
In 2006, Steve Salbu left his position as associate dean at the University
of Texas-Austin to become Georgia Tech College of Management’s new
dean. His vision is for the school to become the world’s preeminent
business school for management and technology within the next decade. To
accomplish this goal, the College is making significant strides at
increasing the size and stature of its faculty in key academic areas:
Accounting, Finance, Information Technology Management, Marketing,
Organizational Behavior, Operations Management, and Strategic Management.
The College is also investing lots of time, talent, and resources into all
available degree programs, from the undergraduate to the MBA to the
doctoral level. In recent years, the College has expanded its MBA options
to include not only the full-time program, but also the Evening MBA, Global
Executive MBA, and Executive MBA in Management of Technology programs to
meet the needs of students on varying career paths.
The College of Management’s rising trajectory is increasingly
reflected by rankings in national and international publications. With the
right people and programs in the right place, the school is creating a new
standard in business education.
Vinod Singhal, professor of operations management and co-author of
Georgia Tech’s most-cited paper in the field, "Does implementing an
effective TQM program actually improve operating performance? Empirical
evidence from firms that have won quality awards" (Hendricks KB and Singhal
V, Management Science 43:[9]: 1258-74, September 1997), comments
on his highly cited paper.
Although firms have invested heavily in developing and implementing
management systems based on the principles of Total Quality Management
(TQM), there has been quite a lot of controversy in both academia and the
business press regarding the ability of TQM to improve financial
performance. This is one of the first papers that have attempted to
rigorously address the issue of the financial impact of TQM using objective
and verifiable data.
The approach of focusing on the financial performance of quality award
winners is quite novel and unique. This paper is having an impact because
it quantifies the extent of positive financial impact from TQM, shows how
the impact varies for different firms, how long it takes before financial
performance improves, and how the capital markets reward firms that have
effectively implemented TQM.
These results are relevant because many organizations across the world have
made a commitment to TQM, and this research validates that these activities
create value. Organizations at local, state, and national levels that
support and administer TQM activities (for example, the Baldrige Quality
Award in the U.S., the European Quality Award in Europe, and the Deming
Prize in Japan) have found the results of this research particularly useful
in justifying and supporting their activities.
Luis Martins, associate professor of organizational behavior and
co-author of "Virtual teams: What do we know and where do we go from here?"
(Martins LL, Gilson LL, and Maynard MT, Journal of Management
30[6]: 805-35, 2004), comments on this research.
I think that the reason the paper is having impact is that organizations
worldwide are increasingly utilizing virtual teams, and there is tremendous
interest both among researchers and managers for an understanding of how to
manage virtual teams. Essentially, virtual teams are being formed to access
the best expertise from across an organization (e.g., global project
teams), to enable global distribution of work (e.g., outsourcing) and to
reduce costs of office space.
However, rigorous research on virtual teams is still in its infancy,
demonstrating wide theoretical and methodological variation. In this paper,
we assessed the state of the research on virtual teams, identified common
themes and areas of disagreement, and set forth an agenda for future
research. One area in particular that badly needs more investigation is
diversity in virtual teams (virtual teams on average are more diverse than
traditional teams, in terms of both observable and more deep-level
characteristics), and some of my current research is looking at that.
Frank Rothaermel, associate professor of strategic management and
co-author of "Exploration and exploitation alliances in biotechnology: A
system of new product development" (Rothaermel FT and Deeds DL,
Strategic Management Journal 25[3]: 201-21, March 2004), talks
about this paper.
This paper is novel because it presents an integrative system of new
product development. In particular, we show that different types of
alliances lead to different outcomes, and that together these different
alliance types form a coherent system of new product development. The paper
is generating citations because it provides not only subtle theoretical
insights, but also strong empirical results in two important research
areas: strategic alliances and information/knowledge search strategies.
This article is not only of interest to academics, but also to
practitioners due to the importance of alliance and knowledge strategies in
many industries. Moreover, it does speak to many areas and has thus been
referenced in many different disciplines, including strategy,
organizational behavior, organizational theory, operations management, IT
management, marketing, etc.
Christina Shalley, professor of organizational behavior and
co-author of "The social side of creativity: A static and dynamic social
network perspective" (Perry-Smith JE and Shalley CE, Academy of
Management Review 28[1]: 89-106, January 2003), offers some remarks on
this highly cited paper.
This article connects two previously separate literatures and offers
several propositions for systematically examining how social networks
influence individuals’ creativity. Prior to this piece, the
creativity literature primarily focused on examining personal factors
(e.g., personality, cognitive ability) that are associated with an
individual being more creative, contextual factors (e.g., supportive
supervision, work goals) that can facilitate or constrain
individuals’ creativity, or the interaction of these personal and
contextual factors.
Until our article, there had been little discussion of the potential role
of social relationships in enhancing an individual’s creative
performance. We felt that a social-network framework could provide a
critical basis for understanding how being socially connected relates to
being creative. An increasingly popular perspective, the network view
considers how various aspects of the relationships that individuals have
both inside and outside of work can influence or are influenced by
behavior.
For example, formal and informal social interactions with others who are
not necessarily directly connected to an employee’s job may have an
impact on the way she approaches problems at work, the knowledge and
information she brings to the task, and ultimately facilitate her
creativity. A social-network approach looks specifically at the overall
context of an individual’s social relationships, and is consistent
with the complex social reality that most workers experience.
Jerry and Marie Thursby, professors of strategic management and
authors of "Who is selling the Ivory Tower? Sources of growth in university
licensing?" (Thursby JG and Thursby MC, Management Science 48[1]:
90-104, January 2002), talk about their highly cited paper.
There has been a dramatic increase in university licensing as universities
attempt to appropriate the returns from faculty research. This change has
prompted concerns regarding the source of this growth—specifically,
whether it suggests a change in the nature of university research. We
developed an intermediate input model to examine the extent to which the
growth in licensing is due to the productivity of observable inputs or
driven by a change in the propensity of faculty and administrators to
engage in commercializing university research. We modeled licensing as a
three-stage process, each involving multiple inputs. Our results suggest
that increased licensing is due primarily to an increased willingness of
faculty and administrators to license, and increased business reliance on
external R&D, rather than a shift in faculty research.
We believe this paper is frequently cited because:
It was published in a highly visible general interest journal
(Management Science).
The question is important not only to researchers, but also to
university administrators and policymakers. There have been many
papers on the growth in university commercialization, but ours was
the first to examine the source of this growth in a careful
framework.
The approach we use is (or was at the time) very novel; thus the
technique itself is of interest to researchers.
Georgia Institute of Technology
College of Management
Atlanta, GA, USA
Steve Salbu, Dean
Sridhar Narasimhan, Senior Associate Dean
Goutam Challagalla, Associate Dean for Executive Programs
Vinod Singhal, Professor and Area Coordinator for Operations
Management
Luis Martins, Associate Professor and Area Coordinator for Organizational
Behavior
Frank Rothaermel, Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Sloan
Industry Studies Fellow
Christina Shalley, NSF ADVANCE Professor of Organizational Behavior
Jerry Thursby, Ernest Scheller, Jr. Chair in Innovation, Entrepreneurship,
and Commercialization and Professor of Strategic Management
Marie Thursby, Hal and John Smith Chair in Entrepreneurship, Executive
Director of TI:GER®, and Professor and Area Coordinator for Strategic
Management
Georgia Institute of
Technology's most-cited paper with 45 cites
to date:
Elmaghraby W, Keskinocak P, “Dynamic pricing in the
presence of inventory considerations: research overview,
current practices, and future directions,”
Manage. Sci. 49(10): 1287-1309, October 2003.
Source:
Essential Science IndicatorsSM from
Thomson
Scientific.