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STUDY BRIEFS n INDEX OF INNOVATION The Marshall Center for Global Innovation at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has developed an innovation index based on five market-based metrics. To create the index, co-authors Gerard Tellis of USC and Andreas Eisingerich of the Imperial Col- lege Business School in the United Kingdom looked at a sample of companies drawn from Fortune's list of the 300 largest U.S. firms and BusinessWeek's list of the 100 most innovative firms between 2004 and 2008. They found that not only does a company's level of innovation predict its financial performance, but also that $10,000 invested in the top 20 firms in their innova- tion index between 2004 and 2008 would have yielded a 46 percent higher return than the same amount invested in the S&P 500. The authors plan to update the study to include data from 2009 and 2010, as well as test the performance of the index with real investments. The full report is available at www. marshall.usc.edu/cgi/innovation. n CONSIDERING CLIMATE CHANGE When companies consider their near-term strategic plans, they should include climate change in their equations, says Martina Lin- nenluecke, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland Business School in Australia. In her recent dissertation, Linnenluecke notes that many companies—even those with infrastructure in disaster-prone regions of the world or those reliant on stable climate conditions—have yet to assess their own vulnerabil- ity to climate change and extreme weather events. But it's an invest- ment they can't put off, she argues. "Organizations should think about their ability to resist certain impacts and to recover from others, and also ask, 'What is the amount of change we are able to withstand?'"she says. Linnenluecke worked with Andrew Griffiths, a professor of business and sustainable strategy at UQ, to complete her research. Their paper "Beyond Adaptation: Resilience for Business in Light of Climate Change and Weather Extremes" is forthcom- ing in Business & Society. n JUST A TOUCH A simple pat on the back can encourage an employee to take more risks—just make sure that pat comes from a woman. That's according to researchers Jonathan Levav, associate professor of business at Columbia Business School in New York, and Jennifer Argo, an associate profes- sor in the department of marketing, business economics, and law at the University of Alberta School of Busi- ness in Canada. Levav and Argo set RESEARCH RECOGNITIONS n Michael Luthy, professor of marketing at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, has been awarded the Fulbright Enders Visiting Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations by the Coun- cil for International Exchange of Scholars. For his research, Luthy will interview government officials and ambassadors stationed in Canada to study the role of embassies in fostering investment, trade, and entrepreneur- ship in their home countries. up experiments where participants were asked to choose whether or not to take a financial risk. Before they made the choice, however, some received a pat on the back from a woman, some from a man, and some received no touch at all. Those who received a woman's touch were 50 percent more likely to take the risk than those who received the pat from a man or no pat at all. The researchers also found that a hand- shake from either gender had no effect on risk taking. "Physical Con- tact and Risk Taking" is forthcom- ing in Psychological Science. n Terence Mitchell, professor of man- agement and organization at the University of Washington Foster School of Business in Seattle, has received the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Divi- sion of the Academy of Manage- ment. The award is designed to recognize an outstanding scholar whose research and service have made an indelible contribution to the discipline of organizational behavior. n z BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2010 57 MICHELE CONSTANTINI/PHOTOLIBRARY