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“Seed is important in that it fills the gap in research,” Bloom said.When students registered for the open house, they were given the option to pick their top three choices for possible lab tours that they will be attending. By looking at the bigger picture, the global research efforts of Seed can more effectively ease poverty and improve lives in the developing world. Yet hunch-driven decision-making happens all too often in the developing world, with aid going to reduce the symptoms of poverty, rather than its underlying causes. “There’s no way a company would spend $20 million on an advertising campaign or $100 million on a cashew nut factory without doing any research first,” he said. That’s similar to how private companies make decisions, Bloom noted.

#The learning factory virginia how to#

For example, research-driven studies can help nongovernmental organizations make better-informed decisions about how to spend direct aid dollars. Multidisciplinary research like the kind that Seed supports can have a tremendous impact in shaping good economic policy, according to Bloom. The answers are not just academic - and neither is Bloom’s research. “It’s like one of those science fiction films where they open up the long-disused spaceship and everyone is waiting to see what’s inside,” said Bloom. Workers at garment factory in Southeast Asia. When Bloom returns to reassess the 28 factories in Tarapur, he has no idea what he will find, he said. Research grants like Bloom’s are awarded based on the belief that business is one of the most powerful engines to move developing economies into greater prosperity.

Stanford Seed is an initiative led by Stanford Graduate School of Business that’s working to end the cycle of global poverty. With the help of a grant from the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, also known as Stanford Seed, Bloom will return to India to find out. Daily monitoring of cleanliness helped to avoid the buildup of oil and cotton around weaving machines, preventing fires and improving safety.īut a question has persisted for Bloom since he left Tarapur: Did the factories’ transformations last? They also hired more workers and had fewer accidents.Ĭonditions improved dramatically at the factory where the worker’s leg was broken: The company became so successful that it opened a second factory and hired 100 additional weavers, attracting them from rivals by offering higher wages. On average, firms that received consulting help cut their product defects by half, reduced inventory by 20 percent, and raised output by 10 percent. For follow-up, the team visited all 28 factories every month for more than a year.

The research team randomly assigned 14 of the plants to an intervention group that received advice from an on-site consultant for five months and 14 to a control group, left to operate as usual. “I wanted to apply this same scientific rigor to the study of management,” Bloom said. That’s no coincidence: His father is a scientist who conducts large-scale randomized control trials of drugs. Using the precision of a medical researcher, Bloom and his co-authors created an interventional study for 28 factories. To conduct his initial investigation, Bloom and his colleagues moved in 2008 to textile hub Tarapur, India, for two years. Many small factories provide the West with their clothes.