Jinglong Zhao’s Innovation Pipeline: Fusing Business with Engineering

by Mia Knežević, CISE Staff

How does your DoorDash order get to your doorstep so quickly?

Jinglong Zhao, Assistant Professor of Operations and Technology Management at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business — and faculty affiliate of both the Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE) and the Hariri Institute — has some answers.

Zhao’s research sits at the crossroads of business and engineering. He focuses on a key question: How can companies develop new products or services that optimize efficiency while enhancing customer satisfaction? To tackle this, Zhao created a “product innovation pipeline” — a modeling framework that evaluates and filters business proposals to identify those with the highest potential impact.

In a recent paper, “Experimental Design for Causal Inference Through an Optimization Lens,” Zhao explores how to design experiments from an optimization perspective. His work is especially relevant in industries where companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash race to refine their offerings faster than the competition.

By optimizing the data needed for experiments, Zhao helps businesses reduce the time it takes to test and launch new features.

Learn more about Zhao’s work in this CISE story.