Sandra Rothenberg - Featured Faculty 2022
Sandra Rothenberg
Saunders College of Business
Rothenberg’s research stems from an interest in how firms can improve their impact on society and the environment, with a focus on the interactions among business, technology innovation, government and society. One of the earlier researchers in the broad field of environmentally sustainable management, her research shows that environmental and social responsibility can have positive impacts for firms though outcomes such as decreased production costs, improved product quality, and increased product differentiation.
Concerned with the lack of attention to consumer material consumption in both business and management research, Rothenberg’s research evolved focus on how firms can develop profitable business models that encourage reduced consumer material consumption. Her research published in Sloan Management Review, for example, looks how firms can shift to profitable product service systems to help reduce consumption of their material products. She has also developed a typology of low consumption business models and shown how models that are significantly different than traditional business models, such as collaborative consumption, have been less explored by management scholars.
With an undergraduate degree in bioengineering, and a dual appointment in both Management and Public Policy, Professor Rothenberg’s enjoys and values interdisciplinary research. Going back to her bioengineering roots, Rothenberg has most recently started to look at how policy impacts medical device innovation in partnership with faculty and students in engineering. A recent article in IEEE Engineering Management Review, for example, looks at how ventilator innovation was impacted by emergency use authorization regulatory standards during COVID. This research also reflects her interest working with undergraduate and master’s students; nine of her publications have been co-authored with students. Perhaps her most prized publication, however, is a 2022 paper published with her 89 year old father in JASA Express Letters that proposes a way to measure voice distortion from face masks….
Her papers have been awarded the MCB University Press Award for Excellence and Outstanding Paper and Highly Commended Winner at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. In 2022, she was recognized as a top-cited scientist in 2021 in a Stanford University’s World's Top 2% Scientists.
Sandra Rothenberg
Professor
Saunders College of Business
Department of Management