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Research Duke University professors Gavan Fitzsimons and Tanya Chartrand find that when people are exposed to Apple's creativity- associated logo, even a brick can inspire their imaginations. want to win their next tennis match, a little exposure to Nike's swoosh wouldn't hurt. Their paper "Automatic effects of brand exposure on behavior" was published in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Emigration Boosts Innovation When innovators emigrate to jobs in new countries, they create a chain reaction of positive economic side effects, not only for their new orga- nization and country, but also for the organization they left behind. In a study from the University of Creative Brands Spark Creative Behavior A boost in your creative abilities may be only a logo away, say researchers from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, North Carolina, and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Gavan Fitzsimons and Tanya Chartrand, professors at Duke, and Gráinne Fitzsimons, an associate professor of social psychol- ogy at the University of Waterloo, discovered that even split-second exposure to well-known brands can inspire people to express the traits those brands convey. "Each of us is exposed to thou- sands of brand images every day," says Gavan Fitzsimons. "Our work demonstrates that even fleeting glimpses of logos can affect us quite dramatically." For their study, the researchers selected two competing but well- known brands—Apple and IBM. Apple's brand is seen as noncon- 54 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2008 formist, innovative, and creative; IBM's brand, as traditional, smart, and responsible. The team pre- sented university students with a computer-delivered visual acu- ity task, during which they were exposed to quick, imperceptible flashes of either the Apple logo, the IBM logo, or no logo at all. After completing the task, partic- ipants were asked to invent as many uses for a brick as they could. Of the three test groups, those exposed to the Apple logo won the creativ- ity challenge, coming up with more inventive uses for a brick. These findings suggest that com- panies with established brands might spend their advertising dollars more wisely on product placement and outreach opportunities, rather than on traditional print and television ads. At the same time, consumers aware of how brands can influence their behavior could use this knowl- edge to their advantage. That is, say these researchers, for those who Toronto's Rotman School of Man- agement in Ontario, Canada, doctor- al student Alexander Oettl and entre- preneurship professor Ajay Agrawal found that when scientists, engineers, and other inventors emigrate to new countries, they expand their social and professional networks. That generates a flow of new expertise and ideas into their new organizations and back to the ones they've left behind. Eventually, this process broadens the knowledge base in the inventor's new home country. "A German engineer who moves to Canada develops a social and professional network in her new country while still maintaining, to some degree at least, connections with her network in her original country," explains Oettl. Companies that lose prized employees to firms in other countries Ajay Agrawal Alexander Oettl