Fernando Dias Silva/Getty Images How should brands react when faced with negativity from reviewers? Recent research published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology suggests that brands could benefit by proudly brandishing the very insults hurled at them. Researchers Katherine Du, Lingrui Zhou, and Keisha Cutright examined whether brands can benefit from “reappropriating” insults, or intentionally… →

Gerasimov174/Getty Images We often assume that leadership influence flows from visibility and authority. But our new neuroscience research suggests that when it comes to building consensus, real influence comes from a very different source. In our study, we used functional MRI technology to scan the brains of 49 MBA students as they watched ambiguous film… →

georgeclerk/Getty Images Leaders who recognize that outsiders can be major drivers of innovation often seek to bring new knowledge into their organizations by making external hires. But recent studies show that although these outsiders do bring new knowledge with them, leaders can’t be certain that their organization will effectively use or absorb that knowledge, given… →

Shawn Read/MIT SMR Monica Caldas is executive vice president and global CIO of Liberty Mutual Insurance. Before joining the company in 2018, she spent 17 years at General Electric working on transformation projects, including digitizing supply chains and using data to predict locomotive engine failures. An immigrant from Portugal who came to the U.S. at… →

Cuteness is having a moment in the marketplace. The fervor around cute products has spread well beyond children’s plush toys like Labubu and Squishmallow to cell-phone cases and even credit-card designs. And countless companies are leveraging this cute aesthetic—either in the product itself or its packaging—to increase consumer appeal. “In marketing research, we have mostly… →

Once upon a time, there was an easy way to diversify your stock portfolio: go international. In the U.S., smart investors could hedge their domestic investments by buying stocks or index funds from other countries. In years where the American market declined, that international exposure gave you uncorrelated performance from foreign markets, dampening some of… →

One of the surprise hits of 2025 was the animated film K-Pop Demon Hunters. Though it initially received only a small theatrical release in June, buzz around the movie grew so much while it was streaming on Netflix that a wider theatrical run in August topped the U.S. box office. Netflix later declared it the… →

Every product or service sold by a firm has a unique demand curve—a relationship between how much customers want a thing and how much they’re willing to pay for it. And for many firms, “it is hard to know what exactly it looks like,” says Suraj Malladi, an assistant professor of managerial economics and decision… →

What does origami have to do with space exploration? The art of paper folding dates back centuries. Through the design of elegant three-dimensional shapes, origami artists developed ways of creating objects that are light yet incredibly strong and complex. But it wasn’t until the twenty-first century that engineers started to take notice. Faced with designing… →