Alex Shaw, Haotian Zhou

University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Uncertainty can often inspire anxiety. It has been shown to have negative effects on the markets and even the economy at large. But research suggests that uncertainty in rewards can motivate us to pursue goals.

Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach and Christopher K. Hsee, and coauthor Luxi Shen of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a recent Booth graduate, investigated the relationship between uncertainty and motivation by offering participants in a study a reward to complete an unpleasant task and manipulating the magnitude and certainty of this reward.

Jeremy Simon

Writer, McCombs School of Business

Your head may be full of business improvement ideas, but there’s a chance your manager doesn’t want to hear them. That’s a problem for your organization, says Ethan Burris, associate professor of management at the McCombs School of Business.

Successful companies seek out ideas from all employees and then put good ideas into practice, Burris noted in his lunchtime talk at the Texas Enterprise Speaker Series on March 31. “If we’re going to increase performance overall, it’s dependent on employees having candid conversations about what works and what doesn’t, and then having their managers take action,” he said.

So why wouldn’t a manager want to hear from employees? Burris pointed to two related theories:

Robert Preer

Writer, Cornell Enterprise

The basic approach to marketing a beverage used to be straightforward: Craft an appealing logo and a catchy jingle, sign up a celebrity endorser, produce a series of television commercials and magazine ads, and perhaps put up billboards and insert coupons in Sunday newspapers.

The maker of Red Bull, the world’s largest selling energy drink, adopted a different formula. To promote the beverage, which was launched in Austria in 1987 and introduced to the United States a decade later, the Red Bull company established its own media organization. Red Bull Media House produces a print magazine, video games, feature films, records, mobile apps, and programming for television, radio, and online media. Red Bull also owns several auto racing teams, as well as professional soccer franchises in the United States, Europe, and Africa.

Ed Robinson

Writer, Capital Ideas, Chicago Booth

Paid internet search ads, also known as search-engine marketing (SEM), dominate online advertising. According to the latest figures available, advertisers spent $18.4 billion on paid search ads in 2013, or 43 percent of total US internet advertising revenue.

But many of those ad dollars being spent by well-known companies may be going to waste. A study of SEM’s impact suggests that while it might help bring in some new or infrequent customers, it doesn’t appear to have much impact on another important audience: frequent internet users seeking well-known brands.

Debbie Johnson

Did you know that “introducing something new” is the definition of innovation? I would say the term innovation has become ubiquitous/popular/etc, but innovation itself is not recent. It’s what defines us as humans (the wheel, agriculture, steam train, Tesla…).

We admire people and companies that are innovative, from Apple and Google to Uber or Airbnb. So, too, the City of Austin is getting on the bandwagon. They devote resources in the form of a Chief Innovation Officer (Kerry O’Connor) and a small innovation department to tackle some of our most intractable challenges like traffic, affordability and our educational system.

Innovation can take many forms but there are three principles I learned in a recent workshop given by Humantific, the City of Austin’s consultant in this area. (I took some license with their terminology for ease of understanding.)

Vikas A. Aggarwal

Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise at INSEAD

Bringing people from different backgrounds together to work in teams can help generate new ideas, but creating diversity across teams can unlock even greater innovation.

Organisations in today’s era of hyper-competition are increasingly reliant on innovation to sustain a competitive advantage. This is particularly true for newly established start-ups, where ongoing innovation is fundamental to effective product market competition.

An important precursor to innovation is the ability to take knowledge from different areas and to recombine it in new and impactful ways. Teams are an important aspect of this process. Having people work in teams and sharing ideas can allow firms to create a more sustained pipeline of innovation than the “light-bulb moments of lone genius,” as noted by Aspen Institute CEO, Walter Isaacson. While the need for team-based innovation is widely acknowledged, less well understood is how multiple teams should be organised within a company in order to maximise innovation for the firm as a whole.