Knowledge@Wharton Business Research Journal

Yahoo Continues Its Search for a New Identity

Since becoming CEO of Yahoo a year ago, Marissa Mayer has undertaken a far-reaching effort to turn around the beleaguered search company. She has refreshed Yahoo's homepage, made changes to core sites like Flickr and completed a series of acquisitions, including the popular micro-blogging site Tumblr. So far, Yahoo's financial performance under Mayer has been mixed, however, and Wharton experts say the firm still lacks a defining, sector-topping product to solidify its return to relevance.

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Losing Patience (and Patients): What Makes People Wait in Line, or Decide to Bail

When you overhear a person five spots ahead of you at the coffee shop ordering a mocha light decaf no whip one pump, it might be enough to make you abandon your place in line and walk out of the store. But what if the context is different, and the issue at stake isn't a hand-crafted drink, but your health? The factors influencing people who face this dilemma are analyzed in "Waiting Patiently: An Empirical Study of Queue Abandonment in an Emergency Department," by Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Robert J. Batt.

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Cost Efficient, Open-space Office Designs: Ditching Desks -- and Privacy

As more companies adopt an open-space design philosophy to encourage more conversation and collaboration -- along with cost savings -- some question whether the resulting loss of privacy and frequent interruptions could end up hurting productivity.

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Ben Jealous and the NAACP: The 'Bold, Scary Dreams' of Every Generation

Ben Jealous was appointed president and CEO of the NAACP at a time when its membership was in decline. Jealous, however, has spent the last five years reversing that decline, increasing the number of donors and focusing on current hot-button issues like elimination of the death penalty. What's important, he said during a Wharton leadership lecture, is to "sit with people whom you disagree with 99 out of 100 times and find the one thing you can agree on."

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The New Model for Innovation Is Social -- and Mobile: But Are Companies Ready?

Consumers are turning to social media and mobile technology to accomplish an ever-growing list of tasks, from finding a doctor to turning on an air conditioner. These changes have left many industries ripe for disruption by companies willing to change their business models and marketing practices to fit a new generation of customers, according to experts who spoke at a recent conference organized by Wharton's Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the school's San Francisco campus.

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From the Global Financial Crisis, Lessons Only Partially Learned

Some of the holes in the global financial system's risk-management defenses have been patched since the financial collapse five years ago, according to panelists at the recent Wharton Global Forum in Tokyo. But bankers are still overpaid, and the needs of customers and the real economy are often still overlooked, speakers said. The panel also questioned whether the economic turnaround that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is attempting to engineer will produce the structural reforms required for success.

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Why Social Entrepreneurs Should Pressure-test Their Ideas

Social entrepreneurs -- those who try to tackle major social problems such as poverty and disease while generating revenues -- are often well-meaning people. But in their desire to make a difference to society, they sometimes fail to subject their ideas to rigorous tests. Ian MacMillan, a professor of management at Wharton, and James Thompson, who leads the Wharton Social Enterprise Program, have just published an ebook titled, The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook, to help entrepreneurs do just that. (Video with transcript)

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