Kirsten Detrick T’92 spent more than 30 years as an executive in the biopharma industry, working for firms such as Takeda, Amgen, and Bristol Myers Squibb. Detrick recently returned to Tuck to teach the mini course “Contemporary Issues in Biotechnology,” which is offered every year in the spring.

Detrick discusses her career, her course, and some of the most pressing challenges faced today in the biopharma space. Detrick uses her position as an adjunct professor to teach, coach, motivate, and inspire. As she explains in the conversation, biopharma is a business, “but unlike other businesses, it has humanity at the very core of what it’s about. The people who succeed, thrive and find themselves attracted to this industry are those who hear a higher calling and want to use business to address that higher calling.”

In a new paper, Raghav Singal creates a model that answers an important counterfactual question for people harmed by delay-and-deny: what if the procedure was approved in a timely fashion? Using specific healthcare data, Raghav’s model can answer that question with striking accuracy, showing the probability that a timely screening or procedure could have had a positive impact on a patient’s health.

Adjunct professor Joshua Lewis spent 35 years in venture capital and private equity and has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford. He brings that experience and knowledge to bear in a new course he developed for Tuck called Moral Reasoning: From Machiavelli to The Bomb to AI. In it, he blends classic moral philosophy with real and fictional protagonists to inspire students to contemplate and discuss ethical decision-making in a variety of contexts. In this episode, Lewis talks about the genesis of the course, his teaching style, and some examples of the protagonists the students study. Two students, Leen Ajlouni T’25 and Ryan Montgomery T’26 also share their thoughts on the course.

In this podcast, we learn about the role laundromats can play in connecting low-income people with health care and social services, and how a startup called Fabric Health co-founded by Tuck alumna Courtney Bragg T’18 is helping to make those connections. 

What do gunpowder, Julia Child, and the iPhone have in common? They are all “epic disruptions” that changed the world. In this episode, Tuck clinical professor Scott Anthony D’96 discusses his new book Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World.

Listen in as Scott dives into a few of these epic disruptions and explains disruptive theory, the influence of Clayton Christensen, and the lessons we can learn from disruption about creativity and strategy.

In 2024, Tuck professor Daniel Feiler had a series of confidential conversations with executives of numerous NBA teams. As an expert in the psychology of judgment and decision making, Feiler was curious how these executives were using the proliferation of in-game data to make decisions about which players to trade, recruit, and draft. He found that, like managers in any organizational environment, NBA executives were prone to making biased decisions without even realizing it. They evaluated players using differing standards, or they didn’t fully account for the context of players’ performance, or they over-weighted how certain players performed against them.

In this podcast, Feiler discusses how he worked with NBA teams, and what he learned about decision biases that can apply to other corporate settings.

All businesses must endure a crisis every now and then. But not all businesses are digital platforms, such as Facebook, Uber, and eBay. What sets these businesses apart is their role as an intermediary between sellers and buyers, two stakeholders who are crucial to the business model but who can react to a crisis in very different ways, and with different consequences.

In this episode, Tuck marketing professor Prasad Vana talks about a new paper that takes an in-depth look at platforms in crisis. The paper is titled “When Crisis Hits the Platform Economy: The Effects on Supply, Demand, and Spillovers.” In it, Vana studies two crises that the platform Kickstarter went through, and the impact those crises had on people looking to fund projects and the backers of those projects. He finds that the crises had bigger effects on the supply side stakeholders than on the backers, and that projects that relied on a fan base—such as art and culture-related efforts—were especially likely to respond negatively to crises. 

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.