Responsible Business Innovation Lab Seed Grants
The Responsible Business Innovation Lab (RBIL), a new initiative of the Institute for Innovation and Economic Development, has announced its first seed grant winners. These awards support early-stage projects, which are often the hardest to fund, by reducing barriers and streamlining the review process. Beyond financial support, the grants provide visibility and recognition for ideas that advance responsible business in research, teaching, and community impact.
Awardees (alphabetical by last name)
Mohamed Abouzahra, Ange Nariswari, Heiko Wieland
Bibliometric methods—like keyword-based analysis and citation counts—have been used to review academic literature for years, but they produce descriptive overviews with limited guidance for theory or practice.
This research integrates existing tools with advanced AI techniques to make literature reviews more prescriptive. Applied to the sustainability and marketing literature, the project has two goals:
(1) Gain a deeper understanding of how research in marketing and sustainability intersect for use by scholars and practitioners
(2) Create an AI-assisted methodology for conducting systematic literature reviews in any scholarly field
Leslie Boni
Investors who want to support socially and environmentally responsible companies face the difficult task of figuring out which ones to invest in.
Leslie Boni plans to review the financial literature on “greenwashing”, or false claims about good social and environmental conduct, and apply the detection methods to mutual funds to generate a baseline assessment of mutual fund "greenness".
Students are then asked to get ChatGPT’s assessment of mutual fund “greenness”. Student results are compared with the baseline to measure bias and hallucinations.
This research has the potential to develop an important practical tool for measuring greenness but also a general approach to detecting bias and hallucinations in AI tools.
Dante Di Gregorio
Entrepreneurial strategies generally try to make business models difficult to imitate in order to grow the company (scale up). But when a company’s purpose includes making a positive social or environmental impact, it can make sense to scale out by encouraging imitation and replication.
Scaling out doesn’t always work when business models are replicated across contexts and by other companies. We study successful scaling out through multiple case studies of impact business models (e.g., work integration social enterprises, micro finance, pay-what-you-can, buy-one-give-one).
Scott Fausti
Can cattle grazing be compatible with the environment? Scott is investigating whether regenerative cattle grazing practices can actually improve soil health and land productivity. His previous research examined regenerative grazing and soil quality, beneficial insects, cattle health and a reduced need for pesticides.
By working with the Ecdysis Foundation, which has a close working relationship with agricultural producers, research findings will be rapidly disseminated to ranchers and rural communities nationally. The Ecdysis Foundation also has powerful supporters including the USDA. California Community Foundation, Cisco Foundation, General Mills Foundation, Ted Turner Foundation, and Thornburg Foundation.
Linda MacDonald Glenn and Jill Jolley Hosmer
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were created to protect human subjects in research settings. The Technology Ethics Review Board (TERBo) expands this concept to address ethical implications of technology development and deployment.
Firms would apply for certification by submitting a description of a project to a TERBo, which conducts an ethical assessment that considers how technology decisions create ripple effects across environmental sustainability, human welfare, economic systems, and social structures.
An impartial "honest broker", TERBo fills a critical gap in technology governance offering value to investors, regulators and technology firms, ultimately building greater public trust in technological innovation.
Jenny Lin
How should restaurants manage food allergies?
Marketing scholars study service triads involving service providers, customers and customer-affiliates in a variety of settings. Research in the medical field usually takes the customer perspective, but with food allergies on the rise, the seller’s perspective–and preparedness–is crucial to finding solutions.
This research examines how providing management awareness and employee training affects customers with food allergies as well as the people connected to that customer, and whether a customer's sense of security and wellbeing, in turn, impacts service experiences, social responsibility and profitability.