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Insights Overview

We conduct original inquiries and transform these insights into practical applications.

The Yale School of Management’s academic expertise, coupled with partnerships with C-level leaders and entrepreneurs from industry, offers a rich environment for undertaking the big, complex challenges that emerge when creating long-term value for shareholders and stakeholders.

The Y-SIM interdisciplinary program gathers the strongest minds driven by intellectual curiosity and real-world application across many areas of the school, including Organizational Behavior, Innovation, Economics, Finance, Leadership, and Marketing.

We actively collaborate with Yale faculty, scholars from other academic institutions, and industry leaders across all sectors to advance our inquiry and thought leadership. If you’re interested in exploring collaboration opportunities, we’d love to hear from you—please reach out.

The multidisciplinary program

  • Brings prominent scholars to campus
  • Offers postdoctoral fellowships
  • Supports collaborative inquiry
  • Provides student internships
  • Hosts lectures, symposia, workshops and conferences

Featured Paper

When Companies Forget Who They Are

The Work of Refounding

When companies experience organizational drift (forgetting who they are), conventional turnaround tools—restructuring, process fixes, portfolio shifts—often prove insufficient. Refounding guides leaders to rediscover and reinterpret the enduring character encoded in an organization’s formative years. It is a research-backed path for renewing purpose, culture, and strategy to create durable long-term value in a volatile environment.

CEO Interviews

Since 2019, we have been interviewing CEOs, CxOs, and board chairs on the “how” of what many refer to as stakeholder capitalism. These insights form the foundation of our program’s thought leadership, with successful examples transformed into original case studies.

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American Savings Bank logo
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Deutsche Börse Group Logo
Farmers Insurance Group logo
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PepsiCo logo
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Case Studies

Case studies are a cornerstone of Y-SIM’s inquiries. Insights derived from case studies shape our frameworks and tools and play a critical role in our curriculum in the MBA classes and Executive Education programs.

Among other topics, these cases explore how industry leaders have:

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Reframed challenges to create and sustain value for shareholders and key stakeholders

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Operationalized purpose and values to guide strategy and drive daily decisions

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Leveraged a “re-founding" moments to differentiate and reframe relationships with key stakeholders.

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Preserved a multi-stakeholder commitment as their company scaled, adapted, and became a public corporation.

Areas of interest

  • How do leaders strategically manage polarizing political and societal issues?
  • How will the social licenses of firms be affected by their AI strategies?
  • How should entrepreneurial firms best address stakeholders?
  • How do companies create value in ways that transcend typical trade-offs among competing stakeholder interests?
  • How are companies leveraging “founding” and “re-founding” moments to undertake a deep examination of the firm’s core purpose, culture, strategy, and relationships with stakeholders?