If the 20th century business landscape was populated by behemoth corporations like GE, Berkshire Hathaway, and Siemens, the 21st century is the era of technology titans such as Apple, Amazon, and Tesla. But these huge firms are separated by more than the border line of Y2K.

As Tuck professor Gordon Phillips explains in this episode of the Knowledge in Practice podcast, the modern tech giants achieved their status not by gobbling up firms in various industries and putting them under one big roof; they did it by developing technologies that have applications in numerous, related sectors. In a new paper, Phillips identifies these companies as “21st century firms” and shows that they have used R&D to increase the scope of their operations by 60 percent between 1989 and 2017. This has resulted in increased valuations, and a significant boost to the markets overall.

“One of our major findings is that valuations go up as scope goes up,” Phillips says. “This is the opposite of the old line conglomerate literature. What’s interesting is that on a per-dollar-of-sales basis, the market is liking these increases in scope.”

Tuck Associate Professor Emily Blanchard, an international economist and former Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of State, unpacks the far-reaching effects of the intensifying global trade war. From sweeping tariffs to supply chain disruptions and shifting geopolitical dynamics, Blanchard discusses the economic and strategic risks posed by today’s trade tensions.

Upwards of 83 million people in the U.S. have a disability, but firms still struggle to make their goods and services accessible to everyone. Part of the challenge is that non-disabled people view accessibility accommodations as tradeoffs against other interests, such as environmental stewardship and convenience, and they are loath to make those sacrifices.

In this episode of the Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Tuck professor Lauren Grewal discusses her paper on this topic: “Hidden Barriers to Marketplace Disability Accessibility: An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Perceived Trade-Offs,” which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2024. In it, she finds that if firms clearly communicate the rationale for and benefits of their accessibility efforts, non-disabled people will be more likely to accept and appreciate them.

In this episode, we talk with marketing professor Peter Golder about how to foster creativity and his new elective course: Creating Winning New Products and Services. In this course, Golder teaches MBA students a “process for identifying market opportunities, creating new product or service ideas, and turning those ideas into valuable new products and services.” One crucial step in this process is learning how to think creatively, which is actually a skill that can be practiced and honed.

Tuck professor Vijay Govindarajan argues in a new book that the same AI and big data advances that brought success to the tech sector will soon unlock enormous value in the industrial sector.

In this episode, VG discusses his book Fusion Strategy: How Real-time Data and AI Will Power the Industrial Future, and he shares how his 40-plus years of studying strategy and innovation have culminated in a bold prescription for the $75 trillion industrial economy.

Praveen Kopalle, the Signal Companies’ Professor of Management, has already shown that machines can write human-like reviews. Now, in a new paper with his Tuck colleague Prasad Vana, he shows that generative AI can produce accurate product reviews that require domain expertise—in this case, for wines. He and Vana accomplished this by creating a transformer model that predicts the wine tasting experience based on three conditions in the grape growing process: precipitation, temperature, and soil.

Kopalle also talks about his forthcoming book, AI-Driven Pricing Analytics, and the elective course he teaches on the subject, Retail Pricing Analytics.

Social media has been both a blessing and a curse, giving us new ways to connect but also digital addiction and misinformation. How can we redesign the AI in social platforms so they are socially beneficial? That’s one of the main research questions that fascinates Tuck assistant professor James Siderius. In the final episode of season one of the Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Siderius talks about his interest in Artificial Intelligence and social media, some of the research he has done (and is doing), and his new elective AI-Driven Analytics and Society.

Did you know that manhood is a precarious trait, and that the precariousness of one’s manhood can influence men’s perception of being flirted with at work? In episode five of the Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Tuck assistant professor Sonya Mishra, an organizational psychologist and gender researcher, discusses her research and its implications in the workplace.