Four Appointments for the University of Toronto's Martin Prosperity Institute Project on Democratic Capitalism.

TORONTO, Nov. 10, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Leading thinkers in innovation, business ethics, management and public policy have been appointed to the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), which is a research centre at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. The appointments will strength the Infrastructure for Democratic Capitalism project, which is part of the expanded mandate of the MPI, and is being led by Prof. Roger Martin, the MPI's academic director and a former Dean of the Rotman School. The project is exploring ways to improve the critical underpinnings of our social, political and financial systems.

Four MPI Fellows with significant experience in research and business have joined the MPI to research a special area of interest for the project.

Adam Grant, The Class of 1965 Professor of Management and Psychology at The Wharton School, will examine the transactional infrastructure of relationships in democratic capitalism.

Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, will study moral infrastructure.

Nilofer Merchant, an author and lecturer at Stanford and Santa Clara Universities, will look at society's emerging power infrastructure.

Mark Stabile, the Founding Director of the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Rotman School, will research the impact of social mobility on democratic capitalism.

The appointments will help further the thinking at the MPI and create broad reaching prosperity. Together they will decode the institutional and societal frames that no longer serve, so we might reinvent them for a more vibrant and viable future.

"Democratic capitalism isn't a perfect system, but it is the best one the world has ever produced," says Roger Martin, academic director of the MPI. "In recent years there have been an increasing number of threats to our political, economic and social systems including the stagnation in median household income and greater economic volatility. In order to ensure it remains both vibrant and viable, we believe we must examine the foundations of the system, the physical, transactional and knowledge infrastructure that underpins our prosperity. Our new appointments will help us to start answering what works and what doesn't work in these structures and contribute to our understanding to how to reinforce and rebuild them."

Adam Grant is The Class of 1965 Professor of Management and Psychology at The Wharton School and author of the New York Times bestseller Give and Take, which was translated into 27 languages and named one of the best books of 2013 by Amazon, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal—as well as one of Oprah's riveting reads, Harvard Business Review's ideas that shaped management, and the Washington Post's books every leader should read. He has been recognized as Wharton's top-rated teacher and one of Bloomberg Businessweek's favorite professors, the world's top 40 business professors under 40, HR's most influential international thinkers, and Malcolm Gladwell's favorite social science writers. His research, speaking, and consulting clients include Google, Goldman Sachs, Merck, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and the U.S. Army and Navy. An award-winning researcher and leading expert in work and success, he has published more than 50 articles during the last five years in prominent psychology and management journals. He holds a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan and a BA from Harvard University, and he was profiled in the New York Times magazine cover story, "Is giving the secret to getting ahead?"

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years before joining NYU. His research focuses on morality - its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental course. He began his career studying the negative moral emotions, such as disgust, shame, and vengeance, but then moved on to the understudied positive moral emotions, such as admiration, awe, and moral elevation. He is the co-developer of Moral Foundations theory, and of the research site YourMorals.org. He uses his research to help people understand and respect the moral motives of their enemies (see CivilPolitics.org, and see his 2008 TED talk). He was the 2004 winner of the University of Virginia "Outstanding Faculty Award." He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006), and of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012).

Nilofer Merchant teaches innovation at Stanford and Santa Clara Universities. During a 20 year career, she has personally launched 100 products amounting to $18B in revenue. Her career includes stints at Apple, Autodesk, GoLive/Adobe as well as service on both public and private boards. She is the author two best-selling books: The New How (2010); and 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra (2012). She won the 2013 Thinkers50 Future Thinker Award. She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, written innovation columns for Businessweek and Forbes and is a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Wired, and Oprah. Merchant earned her MBA from Santa Clara University, a BS in Economics from University of San Francisco.

Mark Stabile is Founding Director of the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Rotman School. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  His recent work focuses on the economics of child health and development, child mental health, health care financing, and tax policy and health insurance. He has advised the Governments of Canada and Ontario, among others, on health care reform and programs to reduce child poverty. He is co-editor of Exploring Social Insurance: Can a Dose of Europe Cure Canadian Health Care Finance, published in 2008 by the McGill-Queen's University Press. He serves on the Advisory Board for Canada 2020 and on the Board of Directors for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. Professor Stabile received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and his BA from the University of Toronto.

For further information on the Martin Prosperity Institute, visit http://martinprosperity.org/ or follow on Twitter @MartinProsperiT.

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SOURCE Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

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