FACULTY TAKE IT TO THE STREETS
Kelley MBA professors are among the best you’ll find not only in the classroom. They’re also highly sought after as consultants in a wide variety of industries. The work our faculty does in the business world makes them even better teachers back in the classroom.

Shopping Deconstructed
Ray Burke knows that shopping involves more than just people walking down the aisles of a store and choosing merchandise. A lot more. The E.W. Kelley chair of business administration and founding director of Kelley’s Customer Interface Lab, Ray studies “shoppability,” or the science of shopping.

“We explore new ways to use technology to enhance the consumer shopping experience,” Ray said. “And we use technology as a marketing research tool to record and analyze shopper behavior.”

Ray has worked with major apparel retailers to analyze the shopping dynamics in one of its stores. Using video cameras and tracking devices, Ray discovered something interesting: men had trouble putting outfits together and were hesitant to pick up items because they couldn’t refold them properly. Ray’s observations led to changes in how the store displayed and folded clothes, increasing sales by 40 percent.

In the classroom and lab, Ray works with MBA students to delve deeper into the science of shopping. As he puts it, “Shopping is a journey, and we look at each separate stage in the process.”

B-ball by the Numbers

Professor of Operations and Decision Technologies Wayne Winston loves basketball. But unlike most fans, he’s more than just a spectator. Working with Kelley alumnus Jeff Sagarin (MBA ’83), Wayne developed WINVAL, a statistical evaluation system used to help team owners and coaches evaluate player’s strengths and weaknesses and put the best combination of players on the floor.

So far, WINVAL has been used with great success by another Kelley alumnus, Mark Cuban (BS ’81), owner of the Dallas Mavericks, especially in the 2006 playoffs against the San Antonio Spurs.

“We used WINVAL to convince the Mavs to start Devin Harris because he could guard [Spur’s point guard] Tony Parker,” Wayne said. “And it worked.”

The Mavericks won that series and have used Winston’s system to great effect ever since. As for working with the famously flamboyant Cuban, Wayne said it’s been a blast.

“It’s been really good. Mark’s a great owner and fun to work with.”

The Rewards of Entrepreneurship

Kelley’s MBA Entrepreneurship Program is widely recognized as one of the country’s finest. In fact, in 2007 it was named the 2007 National Model program by the U.S. Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE).

The program’s prestige is due in large part to its executive director, Donald Kuratko. Don was recognized by USASBE as a leader in the field and awarded the John E. Hughes Entrepreneurial Advocacy Award for 2007. He was won the Entrepreneurship Advocate Award given by the National Academy of Management—the highest award bestowed in entrepreneurship studies.

“While these honors reflect my personal commitment go entrepreneurship, I believe they also exemplify our phenomenal entrepreneurship team at Kelley,” Don said. “The awards validate IUs position as the finest business school in the world for entrepreneurship.”

Keeping Customers Happy
Neil Morgan is an expert on what makes customers tick. An associate professor of marketing at Kelley, Neil takes his expertise outside the classroom and into the real world, where he works with companies to design customer feedback systems.

Generating accurate and useful information about customer behavior and response is “pretty much the ‘heart and soul’ of where marketing can add the most value to any organization,” Neil said. He’s worked with Touchstone Energy to fine tune their feedback system and with JD Power & Associates identify impact of customer recommendations on the business’s performance. Most recently, Neil has been working with Medallia to develop a set of questions for web-based customer surveys.

One of the best things about his extracurricular work, Neil says, is that it makes him a better teacher. “I can add-value to the company through my research and they provide me access to data and funding. And since all of this is grounded in real companies’ current marketing problems, it means that I design my curriculum around important and relevant ‘real-world’ issues rather than textbooks and show my students the empirical evidence for the recommendations I make.”

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