Costello Research Innovation Strategy

George Mason University School of Business boasts more than 60 full-time, research-active faculty across the accounting, finance, information systems and operations management, management, and marketing areas. In addition to pursuing research questions within their area of specialty, many School of Business scholars team up with peers from other disciplines to tackle complex societal problems.

School of Business professors Pallab Sanyal and Shun Ye explore the complex connections between managerial feedback and creative outcomes in new study.

Mehmet Altug, an associate professor of operations management, has been researching retail returns policies for a decade. The issue has recently come to prominence, as the lenient policies of online retailers have led to skyrocketing return rates (now exceeding 20 percent in the U.S.). Altug’s various academic papers delve into the difficult trade-offs retailers face when setting returns policies. While there are no easy answers, Altug’s research identifies factors that can help retailers achieve more strategic flexibility.

Long before COVID was a household word, Dr. Ajay Vinzé, now dean of Mason’s business school, helped pioneer a collaboration with public-health officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, to help predict possible outcomes of various interventions as part of research on pandemic response. Vinzé calls this nearly decade-long partnership “a major part of my research and professional journey.”

These days, devising an outsourcing strategy involves a host of challenges and opportunities. Between deglobalization and pandemic-induced supply chain issues, the 20th century practice of moving manufacturing to wherever labor was cheapest is paying smaller and smaller dividends. As the value proposition of cost-cutting diminishes, a different rationale for outsourcing—one based upon maximizing synergies—is gaining traction. Cheryl Druehl, associate professor of operations management and associate dean for faculty at Mason, lays out a model to help managers think about how to outsource in this new world in her recently published paper in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.

In the earliest stage of innovation, creative proposals are judged according to their perceived novelty and usefulness. Sharaya Jones, assistant professor of marketing at Mason, has a simple yet counterintuitive rule for would-be innovators hawking their ideas: More is more. Her recent paper in Marketing Science, co-authored by Laura J. Kornish of University of Colorado Boulder, pits verbose and detailed idea descriptions against terse ones.

Despite the software industry’s rapid growth and deep pockets, tech companies are still engaged in bare-knuckles battle with cybercriminals. Nirup Menon and Pallab Sanyal's recent research confirms the existence of a willingness-to-pay (WTP) dilemma.

Cheryl Druehl, an operations management professor at Mason as well as the Mason's School of Business associate dean for faculty, has found that unblind contests can foster contestant behaviors that constrain overall innovativeness.

Tarun Kushwaha, a professor of marketing at the George Mason University School of Business, recently ran an experiment that pitted the brainpower of actual human executives against trained algorithms.

“Blockchain is a kind of distributed ledger that could change how business activities are organized,” says Jiasun Li, assistant professor of finance. “It essentially provides an alternative way for economic activities to be conducted.”