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The main take-away from this paper is that for all the talk on the potential of the circular economy, there is a lot to be done to test and verify its broad, sweeping claims, and much of this needs an academic perspective.

Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government

Image ModifiedProf. Ryan Buell, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School, Harvard University

As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs. We propose that peoples’ perceptions of government and their levels of engagement with it can be reshaped and enhanced by increasing government’s operational transparency – that is, by designing service interactions so that citizens can see the often-hidden work that government performs. Across three studies, we find that revealing the “submerged state” through operational transparency impacts citizens’ attitudes and behavior. In Study 1, viewing a five-minute computer simulation highlighting the work performed by the government of an archetypal town increased trust in government and support for government services. In Study 2, residents of Boston, Massachusetts who interacted with a website that visualized service requests (e.g., potholes and broken street lamps), and efforts by the city’s government to address them became 14% more trusting and 12% more supportive of government. Moreover, residents who additionally received transparency into the growing backlog of service requests that government was failing to fulfill were no less trusting and supportive of government than residents who received no transparency at all. Study 3 leveraged proprietary data from a mobile phone application developed by the city of Boston through which residents can submit service requests; the city’s goal was to increase engagement with the app. Users who received photos of government meeting their service requests submitted 60% more requests and in 40% more categories over the ensuing 13 months than users who did not receive such photos. These significant gains in engagement persisted for 11 months following users’ initial exposure to operational transparency, and were highest for users who previously had experienced government to be moderately effective in responding to their service requests. Taken together, our results suggest that revealing the submerged state through operational transparency can shape both attitudes and behavior – results with potential implications for a broad array of service domains where operations are hidden and levels of consumer trust and engagement are faltering.

Dual Sourcing and Smoothing under Non-Stationary Demand Time Series: Re-shoring with SpeedFactories

Image ModifiedProf. Jan Van Mieghem, Professor, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

We investigate the emerging trend of near-shoring a small part of the global production back to local SpeedFactories. The short lead time of the responsive SpeedFactory reduces the risk of making large volumes in advance, yet it does not involve a complete re-shoring of demand. Using a breakeven analysis we investigate the lead time, demand, and cost characteristics that make dual sourcing with a SpeedFactory desirable compared to off-shoring to a single supplier. We propose order rules that extend the celebrated inventory optimal order-up-to replenishment policy to settings where capacity costs exist and demonstrate their excellent performance. We highlight the significant impact of autocorrelated and non-stationary demand series, which are prevalent in practice yet challenging to analyze, on the economic benefit of re-shoring. Methodologically, we adopt Z−transforms and present an exact analysis of several discrete-time linear inventory models. 

Prof. Beril Toktay, Professor, Scheller College of Business, Georgia Tech

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