Price College Newsletter | August 2023

Phillip Suh arrived at OU with one goal in mind — to make the most of his time in college. The MIS and Energy Management major talks about his experiences with Price College’s Study Abroad program, the JCPenney Leadership Program and finding community. Learn more about Phillip in this month’s Student Spotlight.

Canopy Healthtech, led by Price College’s Tom Love Innovation Hub in collaboration with other partner universities, announced its inaugural cohort, awarding $400,000 in grant funding to advance virtual healthtech. Grantees, which included two Startup OU alums, will soon establish their healthtech-based startups in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

OK Catalyst, part of the Tom Love Innovation Hub, hosted the Oklahoma stop of the U.S. Small Business Administration Road Tour, which is designed to connect entrepreneurs working on advanced technology to the country’s largest source of early-stage funding. The July 17 stop took place at the Oklahoma City Convention Center. OK Catalyst is involved in supporting entrepreneurs working on next-generation research and development.

The Price College MBA program, along with some its leaders and a recent graduate, were featured in a Journal Record article about how OU and University of Central Oklahoma MBA grads are finding jobs, in contrast to a national survey that found the opposite for a majority of spring MBA grads.

Price College MBA student Andrew Barton was the spotlight student in OU Online’s summer newsletter. Barton, who expects to graduate in the spring, said the MBA program has challenged him to think outside the box. 

Current accounting students Kurtas Edmonds and Ella Little were named Public Company Accounting Oversight Board Scholars and will each receive a $10,000 scholarship from this accounting regulator for the 2023-24 academic year. Higher education institutions participate in the scholarship program based on accreditation and the number of accounting graduates they produce annually.

Mia-Lynne Smith, a JCPenney Leadership Program Associate, was named first runner-up (Miss Oil Capital) at the Miss Oklahoma pageant in June. This is her second year competing and she received over $16,000 in scholarship funds. A senior marketing and entrepreneurship major, Smith  (pictured second from left) is highly involved on campus. She is this year’s director of board fellows for the JCPenney Leadership Program. She also served as a team captain the past two years in the Love’s Entrepreneur’s Cup, a statewide collegiate business plan competition.

Breea Clark, JCPenney Leadership Center director, spoke at the 2023 Summer Summit: Emerge Empowered event earlier this month. Organized by NextGen Under 30, the event is dedicated to fostering multi-generational knowledge transfer, collaboration and innovation for actively shaping Oklahoma's prosperous workforce.

Naveen Kumar, assistant professor of MIS, and Pankhuri Malhotra, assistant professor of marketing, were included in an OU News article for receiving seed funding for their project, “Examining the Role of Large-Scale Language Models and Prompt Engineering in Enhancing Department of Defense Supply Chain Readiness.” 

Lubo Litov, David M. Moffett Professor of Corporate Finance, presented the following papers: “Technological Uniqueness and Competitive Advantage” with Todd Zenger (University of Utah), MJ Yeung (OU) and Yang Fan (Colby College, Waterville, Maine) June 6 at IESE-Barcelona; “The CEO Compensation Sustainability Goals’ Disconnect: Evidence from the Oil & Gas Industry” with Sudheer Chava (Georgia Tech), Runzu Wang (OU) and Bing Xu (OU) on June 16 at the sixth ECGI Corporate Governance Conference at Erasmus University Rotterdam; and “Technological Uniqueness and Competitive Advantage” at the 2023 Sumantra Ghoshal Strategy Conference on Managerially Relevant Research at London Business School. For more of Litov’s recent presentations and publications, see his Price College bio page. 

Yue “Mark” Ma, a Ph.D. student in accounting, had his paper “Cybersecurity Risk and Corporate Innovation,” co-authored with Gabriele Lattanzio (University of Melbourne), published in the Journal of Corporate Finance. 

Shawn McClean, assistant professor of management, had his co-authored paper, “Who needs nature? The influence of employee speciesism on nature-based need satisfaction and subsequent work behavior,” accepted in the A-level Journal of Applied Psychology. The paper examines the beneficial effects of integrating nature into employees' workspaces (e.g., views of nature, water features, plants, sounds of nature, etc.). His co-authors included Price College Ph.D. alum, Anthony Klotz. McClean, Klotz and another co-author also had an article based in part on this research published in the Harvard Business Review online. The article examines a series of publications they have done linking exposing employees to nature, and the effects of that on their performance, well-being, and creativity.  

Bill Megginson, George Lynn Cross Professor of Finance, presented the paper “Capitalizing Entrepreneurship: The Rise of Growth Equity” at the Barcelona School of Economics Entrepreneurship Summer Forum and at the International Finance and Banking Society at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. The paper’s co-authors are Gabriele Lattanzio (University of Melbourne), Lubo Litov and Alina Munteanu, Ph.D. student in finance. 

Alina Munteanu, Ph.D. student in finance, presented the paper “Capitalizing Entrepreneurship: The Rise of Growth Equity,” co-authored with Gabriele Lattanzio (University of Melbourne), Lubo Litov and Bill Megginson, at the inaugural Conference of the Bulgarian Council for Economic Analyses at the Council of Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria, European Union and at the Seventh Entrepreneurial Finance Association Conference at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.  

Steve Vargo, Siegfried Centennial Chair of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, recently received two research awards. In May, Vargo and the late Robert Lusch (Arizona), who was a former Price College dean, received the Academy of Marketing Science Parasuraman Best JAMS Paper Award for Long-term Impact. Their article, “Service-Dominant Logic: Continuing the Evolution” appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science in 2008, and to date has been cited more than 10,000 times. Vargo, Lusch and Melissa Archpru Akala (Denver) received the 2023 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association Global Marketing Special Interest Group for their article, “The Complexity of Context: A Service Ecosystems Approach for International Marketing,” which appeared in the Journal of International Marketing in 2013. To date, Vargo has amassed nearly 84,000 citations (Google Scholar). 

Huiming Zhang, a Ph.D. student in finance, presented her paper "Skewness and Kurtosis, Real Options, and Investment Under Uncertainty" on June 20 at the Commodity and Energy Markets Association Annual Conference (CEMA) 2023, in Budapest, Hungary. Zhang also virtually presented the paper at the 9th International Symposium on Environment and Energy Finance Issues (ISEFI-2023), which took place May 26 in Paris.