Media Coverage

As the back-to-school season kicked off, retailers across the U.S. stocked stores with fresh outfits, notebooks, glue sticks and kid-sized masks.

So far, many say, those items have largely stayed on shelves as parents and students put off purchases, waiting for more clarity on what learning will look like this year.

Retailers may have psychology on their side — so long as they strike the right tone, said Ashwani Monga, a Rutgers University-Newark marketing professor who studies consumer psychology.

Monga said he’s seen the unique dynamics of the back-to-school season up close. At his college campus, most classes will be held remotely. At home, he said his family has waited to hear if his 15-year-old daughter will go back to school in person.

He said a sense of uncertainty weighs on shopping decisions, including his own. Even if school starts in person, he said, he’s seen outbreaks in other parts of the country that have forced kids to shift back to remote learning.

“You don’t even know when it starts, if it’s going to stay like that,” he said. “It has definitely pushed our own shopping back because you’re like ‘let’s wait and watch’ — and nothing is getting resolved.”

What was expected to be a state budget proposal filled with cuts and spending to blunt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic contained at least one big surprise when Gov. Phil Murphy included a plan to give most newborns $1,000 in savings to start off their lives.

“One could argue that this is the right time to do something like this,” said Lisa Kaplowitz, assistant professor of professional practice in the finance and economics department at Rutgers Business School.

“Given that people in certain income brackets have been impacted by the pandemic to a greater extent because they have jobs they cannot do from home — health care, janitorial staff and others — and who don’t get paid if they do not go into work, providing even a small benefit to their children could make a difference to them,” she continued.

“There’s a lot of innovation that comes out of crisis,” Kaplowitz said. “Could this be an innovative concept to give folks in lower socioeconomic brackets an opportunity to start out when they become adults a tiny step less behind?”

Kaplowitz said that, depending on how the baby bonds program is structured, it could provide an even greater impact if individuals are allowed to add to the state’s initial deposit and have that grow with interest.

Listen to the podcast:
The Rise and Stall of stakeholder influence: How the digital age limits social control and Designing CSR Initiatives for Greater Social Impact.

Michael L. Barnett is a professor of Management & Global Business at Rutgers Business School and Academic Director of the Rutgers Institute for Corporate Social Innovation. Barnett currently serves as an International Research Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Social Innovations Group at EGADE Business School in Mexico, Affiliate Visiting Scholar at the Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma, and Fellow of the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers University.

ROI Influencers: Higher Education 2020 — Deans and directors (A-L)

Lei Lei
Dean, Rutgers Business School
Rutgers University

Lei is not just the head of the state’s top business school, she’s regularly voted one of the school’s top professors. She was the founding director of the Rutgers Center for Supply Chain Management and is considered a national thought leader on the subject.

One week prior to Rutgers University-Newark’s official start of the 2020 fall semester, nearly 2,500 students received warm greetings from Newark’s mayor and Rutgers-Newark’s leaders and representatives during the university’s annual new-student Convocation on Mon., Aug. 24. In addition to Mayor Ras J. Baraka, students heard from Senior Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Corlisse Thomas, Chancellor Nancy Cantor, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ashwani Monga, Executive Vice Chancellor Sherri-Ann Butterfield, and Student Governing Association (SGA) President Dylan Terpstra. The event also included pre-recorded messages from Lei Lei, dean of Rutgers Business School; Jacqueline Mattis, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences–Newark; Bill McCarty, dean of the School of Criminal Justice; Charles Menifield, dean of the School of Public Affairs and Administration; Timothy Eatman, dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community; Deborah Walker-McCall, associate dean of the Academic Foundations Center; and Laura Troiano, acting director of the Honors College.

It is hard to describe tax law succinctly. The federal Internal Revenue Code is over 6,000 pages and contains over 4 million words. As scholars who write about taxation, we are well aware of this challenge. Nevertheless, the 100-word summary that appeared on Invest in Education’s petitions accurately describes its proposed change to Arizona tax law.

The Arizona trial court held there were three tax-related problems with the 100-word summary. The trial court’s conclusions are based in confusion about tax law and a misreading of the Arizona Supreme Court's decision in Molera v. Reagan.

On Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously agreed and ordered the Invest in Education initiative back on the ballot, reversing the trial court's ruling that the 100-word summary was misleading and confusing.

Amazon is reportedly in talks with Simon Property Group to take over mall spaces left vacant by closed department stores, namely those that once belonged to J.C. Penney and Sears. An anonymous source told The Wall Street Journal that Amazon would turn these spaces into online fulfillment centers.

"You’ve got this deeply discounted floor space in urban areas with huge parking facilities and customer density all around," said John Impellizzeri, professor of professional practice in supply chain management at Rutgers Business School. "It could turn out to be a really brilliant play here, if they can get it at the right price."

We find this collection of diverse papers and their summaries to be valuable and timely on how corporations can do better at doing good.

Helping Business Help Society: Overcoming Barriers to Corporate Social Innovation by Michael Barnett (Rutgers Business Review, Summer 2020)

This special issue intends to help corporations do better at doing good. I have brought together ten articles from leading business scholars that, from a variety of perspectives, recognize the challenges of corporate efforts to be more socially responsible and offer insights on how to overcome these challenges.

Grassroots development is more important than ever, because wealth generated in a community remains in and benefits that community. The Land Bank’s approach to development has generated $85 million in community wealth.
The Land Bank considers various factors in evaluating property development plans, including the strength of the plan, its positive impact on the community, the developer’s capacity to perform the work and ability to pay for it.

The Harvard Management Company added three biopharmaceutical companies — including a firm developing a coronavirus vaccine candidate — to its investment portfolio in the second quarter as the overall value of their public securities holdings dropped 28 percent.

John M. Longo, a professor at Rutgers Business School and the Chief Investment Officer for Beacon Trust, wrote that the drop in value this quarter is not necessarily indicative of the endowment’s poor performance.

“What's most probable is that the management team decided to reallocate equities to other investment areas, such as alternative investments,” Longo wrote in an emailed statement.

“Most equity markets around the world rallied strongly in Q2, so it is highly unlikely a diversified portfolio of equities fell 28% in value without changes to the asset allocation,” he added.

Workplace Ethics and Doing the Right Thing

I have blogged before about why good people sometimes do bad things in the workplace. Otherwise ethical people make the wrong turn or are influenced by others that are ethically-challenged.

According to Oliver Sheldon, assistant professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and co-author of a study of these issues published in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. “We think part of the explanation for why people occasionally don’t behave ethically is their failure to confront and realize there’s a temptation”

In addition to acknowledging the temptation, the study suggests that people have to see it as one they might have to struggle with repeatedly, and that could potentially jeopardize their reputation and integrity. “Just thinking about temptation generally in advance essentially helps them to counteract temptation when they encounter it,” Sheldon said.

“Despite being one of the most diverse states in the nation, inequality continues to persist in New Jersey, especially in access to opportunities. Rutgers is proud to work with the NJEDA to begin dismantling these historic inequalities by identifying any existing disparities related to the New Jersey Wind Port project and recommending programs and policies to address both the immediate problem and the underlying causes,” said Kevin Lyons, Ph.D., Director of the Public Private Community Partnership Program at Rutgers Business School. “The Wind Port is an amazing opportunity for New Jersey to build a clean energy future while creating opportunities for businesses, and we look forward to helping the NJEDA complete the project in a way that distributes these economic benefits equitably.”

American Express 0% intro APR credit cards have no interest for up to 15 months on new purchases, balance transfers or both. WalletHub’s editors compared 30+ 0% Amex cards and chose their favorites based on how long the 0% intro rates last, what regular APRs are waiting, and how much you’ll have to pay in fees.

Ask the experts. Do you think the average person knows that not all American Express credit cards are charge cards?

No, I do not believe everyone is aware that Am Ex offers any “no fee” cards as traditionally their model has been fee-based. However, as consumers do recognize that option I do believe many will move to a no-fee option.

Marc Kalan, assistant professor of professional practice at Rutgers Business School.

COVID Nearby uses crowdsensing to empower people to securely generate where it is present and how it spreads.
The key distinguishing feature of COVID Nearby is its strong privacy guarantee since it uses differential privacy.

Rutgers Business School’s Jaideep Vaidya, who is also an IEEE Computer Society Volunteer, received funding from the National Science Foundation to build a secure and privacy-protecting data platform. With that, he led the multi-disciplinary team of Rutgers professors in the development of COVID Nearby.

The professors include scientists from Rutgers Business School, the School of Public Health, the School of Communication and Information, who have expertise in epidemiology, behavioral analysis, and data privacy. COVID Nearby is being developed by the Rutgers Institute of Data Science, Learning, and Applications with support from the National Science Foundation.

Dave Wieneke leads PK’s focus on serving the digital experiences of healthcare organizations, establishing a baseline method of measurement as outlined in PK’s Hospital Digital Experience Index. He teaches about customer-centered management at Rutgers Business School.

Derek Phillips, Director of Content Strategy at PK, and I take a spin through COVID websites as hospitals evolve how they respond to the pandemic. We discuss both their merits and failings, as well as the data visualizations that pace the impacts of COVID. With a focus on Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic, Spectrum and Stanford, we not only review their delivery of patient information on COVID websites but also how conversational interfaces are being used to help support patients as they navigate potential COVID symptoms.

Watch 15 minute webinar.

Pharmaceutical companies that are racing to develop vaccines for the coronavirus are already working behind the scenes to build the supply chains needed to deliver their drugs to billions of people as rapidly as possible.

To serve global demand once a vaccine is approved, a complicated and high-stakes supply chain would kick into gear on a scale that the drug industry has rarely seen.

The magnitude and speed of the effort creates the potential for lapses at each step that could cost invaluable doses.

Drug makers will even need to be on guard against criminal groups that target high-value pharmaceutical goods, said William McLaury, an associate professor of supply chain management at Rutgers Business School.

We’ve come a long way from madhouses, forced sterilization and the countless other ways people with disabilities have been oppressed and ostracized down through history.

One of our biggest leaps forward took place 30 years ago this Sunday, when President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. The landmark civil rights law requires accessibility of public spaces and prohibits discrimination in education, employment, transportation, and all other areas of public life.

But for all the progress, New Yorkers with disabilities know there’s more work to be done.

In 2019, just 31% of working-age people with disabilities in the U.S. had a job, compared to 75% of people without disabilities. That’s an enormous difference, and the COVID recession has only made it worse. Total employment dropped 12% for people with disabilities between February and June. People without disabilities? A 9.5% drop.

By MASON AMERI, LISA SCHUR and DOUGLAS KRUSE

As the district’s designated business-focused comprehensive high school, West Side will incorporate agribusiness education into the student learning experience, as well as environmental science and nutrition. Cook said students will focus on an artisan hot sauce called Rider Heat after the school’s sports teams, complete with a logo of a jalapeño riding a horse.

Newark Public Schools rolled out career academies at its comprehensive high schools in late 2019 and early 2020 as part of its district improvement plan. Rutgers Business School is West Side’s higher education partner and will be involved in the supply chain aspect of the hot sauce bottling and distribution.

“Why is it that people who can execute multi-million dollar deals, who can persuade colleagues of ideas or who can handle conversations about raises and promotions with ease, stumble in negotiations with their kids?” asks Terri Kurtzberg, a professor at Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick.

Kurtzberg says that according to an informal survey of 2,000 parents, negotiations with their children occur on an average of six times a day, lasting about eight minutes each, or 24 hours a month.

The co-author of Negotiating at Home: Essential Steps for Reaching Agreement with Your Kid says even though these interactions may require the same skill set, the know-how that flows freely at work doesn’t easily cross the threshold into the home. Kurtzberg shares tips for managing tough conversations with children while at home during the coronavirus pandemic.

A multi-disciplinary team of Rutgers professors, led by Rutgers Business School’s Jaideep Vaidya, have developed the COVIDNearby app that allows individuals to report coronavirus symptoms with an assurance of privacy.

Vaidya, the director of the Rutgers Institute of Data Science, Learning and Applications and a professor of management science and information systems, said crowdsensing technology has been used to track the spread of the flu, but the coronavirus pandemic created an urgency to incorporate privacy enhancements.

The future had to shelter in place this spring.
Growth-focused insurtechs, whose digital technologies have been revolutionizing the small-business market, faced a new reality as the coronavirus pandemic forced huge numbers of their customers into survival mode.

“Any business that is a service business, if they’re surviving, they may let their employees go,” says Jeffrey Robinson, academic director of the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development at the Rutgers University Business School. “People aren’t making decisions about closure at this moment. Three months from now, if you don’t see your business coming back, that’s where the decisions will be made. Then we’ll see the real impact.”

The most influential men and women in the profession that keep the state’s businesses on track.

Albert Einstein changed the study of physics with his theory of relativity. As the director of Rutgers University’s Accounting Research Center, Miklos A. Vasarhelyi is doing something similar for accounting with his development of continuous auditing and reporting.

Historically, accounting has provided a rearview mirror approach to audits, looking back at historical records to gauge their validity. But Vasarhelyi — who began developing his groundbreaking approach in the 1980s when he was at Bell Labs — has helped to push the profession into a real-time approach by utilizing artificial intelligence and digital tools to analyze transactions and streaming data as they occur.

One example, “[u]nusual or fraudulent insurance payments,” he said. Under the continuous audit model, “you can examine transactions as they’re being processed and can consider the validity. If it’s outside certain boundaries, it can be stopped,” before a check is cut. The next horizon: using his analytic methods to predict events.

Negotiation is all about preexisting relationships and communication. If you're attempting to negotiate remotely, remember that it always helps to have a personal relationship with your boss.

Dr. Charles Naquin suggests having these conversations with your boss via video chat rather than email or text.

Dr. Terri Kurtzberg, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, on the other hand, recommends a surprisingly lo-fi tool for remote negotiations: the telephone.

"When you're on a video call with someone, you're essentially sitting three feet from them. It's intimate," she said.

On the phone, you can free yourself of the face-to-face intenseness and distractions that come with seeing yourself on camera.

"If you promise yourself you won't make a decision on the call, the whole conversation will go differently. You can even announce that at the beginning, to lay out expectations and take some control."

For decades politicians have proposed taxing security transactions as a way to increase government revenues. While increases in personal and corporate taxes would also increase revenue, proponents argue that a security transaction tax (STT), unlike income taxes, would also discourage speculative trading and reduce volatility by, as James Tobin stated, “throw[ing] sand in the wheels of financial markets.”

In contrast, opponents of an STT argue that the tax harms market quality by reducing volume, increasing volatility, and adversely impacting price discovery. Recently, Greenwich Associates conducted a survey of Wall Street professionals as to their opinion of the impact of a Security Transaction Tax on market quality. The responders expressed fear that the imposition of a STT would do just that and harm market quality.

We examine a broad range of market quality measures, including: volatility; spreads; volume; market share; price impact; and price efficiency. We calculate changes in each measure of market quality before and after the change in STT. We control for variables known to be associated with each market quality measure.

We find that an increase in an STT is associated with an increase in average stock volatility (at least for larger STT levels). So rather than reducing volatility as proponents of an STT claim, STTs are directly related to volatility. STTs actually appear to cause the wheels of financial markets to slip and slide instead of slowing them down.

The U.S. Council for International Business (USCIB), which represents many of America’s leading global companies, applauded the U.S. Trade Representative’s recent announcement of a select panel for the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism, a key tool for the enforcement of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade agreement.

“We welcome the inclusion of Ed Potter as one of the select panel members."
Potter is joined by Janice Bellace (Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania), Lance Compa (Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations), Peter Hurtgen (Curley, Hurtgen & Johnsrud LLP), Ira Jaffe (Arbitrator and mediator for labor, employment and benefits disputes) and Kevin Kolben (Rutgers Business School).

“As the State University of New Jersey, we have a critical role to play in helping the state navigate its way over the coming decades into a climate-positive future,” task force co-chairs Robert Kopp and Kevin Lyons said when they presented the report to Holloway. “Embracing that role wholeheartedly will allow us to serve as a global model for public and public-spirited universities in densely populated regions.”

Does negotiating with your kids feel endless? On average, you’ll negotiate with them 6 times today about things like bedtime, screen-time, homework, and on and on. After much research – plus professional and personal experience in the world of negotiation – Dr. Terri Kurtzberg shares proven tactics that will help you better negotiate with your kids.

It takes some imagination, but our virtual work environment — our new normal — can allow “valuable interpersonal networks to survive and even thrive,” according to two professors at the Rutgers Business School, Daniel Levin and Terri Kurtzberg. And compliance leaders are in a unique position, at a unique time, to be a “broker” of those interpersonal networks and a trusted source of information and camaraderie.

The post-COVID education landscape doesn’t look much like its predecessor. From grade-school children being taught by their parents to high schoolers learning 100% virtually to questions about when or if the nation’s colleges will reopen for business, the only certainty is uncertainty.

Reflecting on pre-COVID executive education delivery methods, Lian Qi, associate professional and department chair at Rutgers Business School, says most of it was conducted in person because it provided the best opportunity for students to socialize and create bonds with one another. With social distancing, travel restrictions and limits on the size of gatherings affecting this traditional approach, Qi says schools like Rutgers are mixing things up and finding new ways to engage with students in the post-COVID world.

The study published on Wednesday — conducted by Sterling Bone, a marketing professor at Utah State University; Glenn Christensen, a marketing professor at Brigham Young University; and Jerome Williams, a business professor at Rutgers University — shows that Black borrowers were at a disadvantage even before they submitted a loan application.

“Consumers nowadays receive information from multiple media sources. They have shorter attention spans and are overloaded by and easily influenced by information,” said Rajesh Bagchi, professor and head of the Department of Marketing in the Pamplin College of Business. His new book, “Becoming a Consumer Psychologist,” is co-authored with Ashwani Monga, provost and executive vice chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark.

After years of declines in revenue and print circulation, the McClatchy Company, one of the largest and most respected news publishers in the country, announced on Sunday that it expected to be bought by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey hedge fund, at the conclusion of a bankruptcy auction.

John Longo, a professor at Rutgers Business School, said such ownership did not necessarily mean a disregard for journalism.

“Hedge funds are certainly profit-oriented,” Mr. Longo said. “If the business is not profitable, they’ll do what they need to to right-size it.”

He added: “If they look at the assets they are buying, part of their core purpose is to serve their community. If they don’t do a good job serving their community, the profits won’t follow.”

Listen to Podcast; full transcript provided.

Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world-class experts.

Roger Dooley: Welcome to Brainfluence, I’m Roger Dooley.

Neal Schaffer: Hey, Roger. Hello, everybody. It’s an honor and a pleasure to be here today. My name is Neal Schaffer. I am a digital marketing author, speaker, consultant. I teach executives as part of the executive education program at a Rutgers Business School in the United States, the Irish Management Institute in Ireland, and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland.

My latest book is called the Age of Influence, and it’s really about hopefully redefining in some ways this concept of digital influence and how I believe marketers have in many ways most recently, vis-a-vis social media influence, I believe have been somewhat miseducated.

So I thought this would be great, Roger, and this podcast would be a great arena to discuss those issues and hopefully help a lot of the people that are listening.

"Supply chains" are suddenly big news, as coronavirus complications have made it harder to get products, goods, groceries, and many other things to customers who need them.

Rutgers Business School professor Alok Baveja said that we are headed for a "strategic redesign of supply chains." He believes that's likely to be a great thing in the long run. "We anticipate a trend of supply chains getting shorter and faster, which paradoxically can provide higher resilience and, ultimately, higher profitability."

Baveja warned businesses that they need to think about how they run their supply chains "strategically" rather than "focus on temporary solutions or rely on government incentives."

Todd Simmens, a tax risk management partner with BDO USA and adjunct professor with Rutgers Business School, Accounting & Information Systems, joins the On the Move panel to discuss what to expect as the July 15 tax deadline looms. (Video)

Susan succeeds often in life. She and I have been friends for fifteen years. We are the same age and have the same job — we are both professors at the same level (though at different universities) who study human behavior.

Recently, Susan told me she is planning her next big career move. “It’s going to be a game-changer for my career,” she said. My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. She continued. I feigned encouragement. But, I felt some combination of sad, angry, and scared. Deep down, I hoped she would fail.

It’s horrifying that I did not want Susan to succeed because she is my friend. But, because she is a work colleague, she’s also my competition.

To help you find the best small business rewards credit card for your company’s needs, WalletHub’s editors compared more than 1,000 offers.

Ask the experts

John LongoPh.D., Professor of Professional Practice in the Finance & Economics Department at Rutgers Business School

Should every small business owner have a business rewards credit card?

I believe that all small business owners that are responsible for credit should own one or more business rewards credit cards.

What tips do you have for small business owners who are shopping for a rewards card?

Use the credit cards that provide the maximum benefit for your specific business. Of course, the most important rule about credit cards is to pay them off in full each month, since the interest rate charged on running balances will overwhelm the rewards provided.

I don't think that when starting a career in business many years ago, Beverly Aisenbrey thought she would be hanging with Jamie Lee Curtis on a movie set. But, you never know where life will take you when you just keep persisting and work hard.

Suzee: You are a Rutgers alum as am I. How did your RU education help you in your career?

Beverly Aisenbrey: The education I received from Rutgers Business School, where I completed my MBA, helped me transition from a career as a researcher in the field of biology to management consulting at a private, boutique company specializing in executive compensation consulting. I was offered an ownership position in the firm after several years and stayed with them for my entire 34-year career. I feel that I used all the education I received in finance, marketing, and human resources in my career.

The career aspirations of a generation of women in finance may hinge on getting back into the office or onto the trading floor.

Women fill barely a third of positions in certain areas of finance. And a prolonged stretch of remote work risks making matters worse for those now entering the industry -- especially when it comes to networking and overcoming biases. In-person interaction is a key aspect of developing the allies needed to thrive, says Lisa Kaplowitz, director of the Center for Women in Business at Rutgers Business School. That’s especially true in professions like banking where senior managers have traditionally skewed male.

”If you don’t have that face time with your bosses and your managers, you aren’t going to have that repartee with them,” said Kaplowitz, who’s held senior finance posts at companies and worked as a Wall Street analyst. “Women generally haven’t been as confident to have their voices heard even when they are physically sitting together with colleagues. I hear that all the time from women, and that is just compounded when they are on a Zoom call.”

Listen to the podcast at: https://toddleonardshow.com/2020/07/02/the-todd-leonard-show-featuring-paul-profeta-of-profeta-urban-investment-foundation/

Paul Profeta is a successful real-estate entrepreneur who spoke about his Profeta Urban Investment Foundation (http://profetafoundation.org/) and its mission, which is “to build a world-class research-driven, teaching and practitioner-oriented urban entrepreneurship and economic development program that will transform the economy of Newark, and other urban centers; create wealth in urban communities; and be a model for all urban universities.”

Paul discussed the Rutgers Business School and its Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development (CUEED), which funnels expertise to the startups via a team of MBA students as part of the public-private partnership.

The United States today named panelists for the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism, a key tool for the enforcement of the United-States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) labor protections. The U.S. national panelists are Janice Bellace, Lance Compa, Peter Hurtgen, Ira Jaffe, Kevin Kolben, and Ed Potter.

“The U.S. Department of Labor is pleased that some of the best and brightest in the labor field have been appointed to this vital enforcement panel of the USMCA,” said Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia.

Kevin Kolben is an Associate Professor at the Rutgers Business School and an expert on transnational labor regulation and labor governance in supply chains. Kolben has written extensively on labor in the international context.

Professor John Cantwell, Rutgers Business School, USA, will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Jena Lecture in Economic Geography (JLS) In addition to the keynote lecture, we will organize a one-day workshop that provides participants with the unique opportunity of presenting and discussing ongoing research projects with Professor Cantwell. Interested PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are invited to submit extended abstracts or full papers addressing original research related to the topic of the workshop. Abstracts and papers should be written in English. Prof. Cantwell will hold his keynote lecture on “How Knowledge Connectivity Affects Global Innovation Divergence Across the World’s Major Cities” on November 5, 2020, at 7 pm.

A $300,000 bequest by the estate of a school teacher who was a star Rutgers lacrosse and football player nearly a century ago has grown into a $4 million gift to endow scholarships for student-athletes who compete in eight Olympic sports.

The growth of the funds in Bender’s estate was helped considerably by students at Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick. In 1994, the school established Little Investment Bankers of Rutgers, or LIBOR. Students in the organization provided investment research to the Bender Trust as they pursued both investment returns and valuable career experience. Since 1994, nearly 1,000 Rutgers students have participated in an annual Bender Trust stock analysis project.

Professor Ben Sopranzetti is the advisor for the Little Investment Bankers of Rutgers (LIBOR) and places 30-40 students per year in front office jobs on Wall Street. In the course of his career, he has been involved in the job placement of over 500 students.

It’s been a long journey, but the Black and Latino Angel Investment Fund of New Jersey is about to hear pitches from the first three entrepreneurs hoping for investment.

The fund, started by Lyneir Richardson, executive director of the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development at Rutgers Business School in Newark, has 10 angel investors and has raised $500,000 so far. The angels want to invest at the pre-seed level in companies headed by Black and Latino founders in the Newark area. The fund continues to look for new angel investors to join on this journey.

The idea, Richardson told NJTechWeekly.com, is to give founders of color — who often don’t have a rich patron to help bootstrap a startup — a leg up the funding ladder, so they can get to a level where they’ll qualify for an accelerator.

The New Jersey Society of Certified Public Accountants (NJCPA) is pleased to announce that 40 individuals are the recipients of its 2020 Ovation Awards. The annual awards honor exemplary efforts and outstanding achievements in the accounting profession. The seven award categories are Diversity, Equity & Inclusion; Exceptional Educators; Emerging Leaders; Impact; Innovation; Lifetime Leader; and Women to Watch.

Exceptional Educators
Dr. Leonard Goodman, CPA, MBA — Professor, Department of Accounting, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Aunt Jemima, the long-standing brand that finally was put to rest this week, has slavery in its corporate DNA.
Aunt Jemima, along with Uncle Ben, who it was announced this week will also be getting the heave-ho, were not responsible for creating stereotypes. Bigotry isn’t new.
But the indisputably racist brands, and their bewildering longevity, speak to the power of marketing in reinforcing offensive stereotypes.

Simply put, if corporate America hadn’t given its full backing to creating and promoting these images as sales tools, making them both culturally legitimate and highly profitable, it’s debatable whether the country’s racial divisions would have run so deep for so long.

“There’s very strong support for that premise,” said Jerome Williams, a business professor at Rutgers University. “Corporate America perpetuated this situation.”

A pair of conflicting headlines told the story as the UK attempted to reawaken its shopping gene for the first time in three months. One was: “Johnson tells Brits to shop with confidence”. The other was “London stocks tumble on fears of second virus wave”.

What do anxious people do? They save more. Kristina Durante, a professor of marketing at the Rutgers Business School, carried out a series of experiments on consumer behaviour under stress and published a paper in 2016 on the topic.

She found they turned to savings as a form of taking back control over an uncontrollable situation, but also shifted what they spent their money on. She wrote: “Stress leads consumers to save money in general but spend strategically on products that they perceive as necessities.”

Business consultants and international trade experts say there’s starting to be a real rebound from the planet-wide COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s going to be a lasting impact nonetheless on the way global business is conducted.

Denis G. Hamilton, an assistant professor of professional practice in the Rutgers Business School‘s Department of Management & Global Business, said the ongoing tug-of-war between globalization and nationalism in international trade discussions has been amplified by the crisis.

“The rhetoric from the U.S. has not been favorable towards organizations like the WTO, for example,” Hamilton said. “This is an organization that helps mediate trade agreements and disputes between countries, among other things. As there is less confidence in trade agreements being honored or enforced, then there is more risk in developing such agreements, which can further restrict international trade.”

Looking for tips on how to become a successful minority entrepreneur? A webinar Wednesday — featuring four successful New Jersey entrepreneurs — is intended to offer ideas and steps for success.

Marjorie Perry, CEO and president of MZM Construction Management Co.; Ramon Ray, the founder of Smart Hustle Media; Alfred Blake IV, the assistant director of entrepreneurship programs at Rutgers Business School; and Alex Hamilton, the former CEO of media startup Vipeline Inc., will offer their thoughts.

It’s one of life’s frustrations: No matter who you are, most of the smartest people will always be working for someone else. So, in this big world, no matter how great your team is, it pays to be connected with innovators across your industry.

That’s part of the draw of hack events – people ditch their company affiliations and titles at the door, and for a few days they get to use their skills on problems that are bigger than any one company.