At this point, she’s on fourth day of Manitoba time after two weeks of Hong Kong time (14 hours difference). It was enough to drive Naylor, who works as the Marketing Coordinator of the Asper School’s Stu Clark Centre for Entrepreneurship to get a lunchtime coffee, and she’s not even a coffee drinker.

Was she in Hong Kong for business or pleasure? Well, depends on your definition: where does representing Team Canada for the International Bowling Federation (IBF) Championships fall?

Representing Team Canada

At any point during the last 20+ years, one of the most likely places to find Marissa Naylor would’ve been the bowling alley (the other is the golf course, but that’s another story).

Bowling steady (and competitively) since she was six years old, these days you can find her heading straight to the lanes from the Stu Clark Centre three or four times a week.

So, she’s had some practice. Much like an entrepreneur, she has harnessed focus and dedication over a long time to deliver an amazing product.

The skills she developed made her a perfect candidate for the Canadian team, but first, she had to make the team. This, Naylor says, can be a “ruthless” experience. Canada’s best bowlers come together and each bowl 36 games over three days. 12 a day. The scores are tallied, and the top six make the team.

She first made the team in 2023, and represented Canada at the IBF Championships in Kuwait. But just because she’s been at the IBF Championships before, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a completely different ball game this time around.

At the 2023 Kuwait Championships there were only seven national teams, but in Hong Kong, there was 32—many of the teams filled with pro bowlers paid to be there.

“It was a whole new level of competitiveness,” she said.

Naylor bowled in four events— Women’s singles, doubles, trios, and team bowling. The unfortunate part to report is that neither Naylor, or her Canadian teammates medaled. But in competitive bowling, making the cut can hinge on the tiniest score differentials.

“I’m talking five or 10 pins,” says Naylor. “So a nailbiter, in other words.”

The upside: Naylor gave her all, got to explore the culture of Hong Kong (Disneyland, “the big buddha,” and unique foods) and learned life lessons.

“That’s the beauty of sports,” she says, “it’s a double-edged sword, right? You want to make the cut but you also realize that not everything goes your way, and that’s okay.”

Community and the next challenge

Perhaps with some inspiration from the Asper School’s values of always prioritizing community impact, Naylor has begun giving back to the bowling community.

Over the last year, she has started coaching 12–21-year-olds. Up until then, she had been so busy that it wasn’t a priority.

“But then I was really thinking about it with a mentor of mine who helped me, […] And he was like, if you’re gonna coach, we need female representation. So in the bowling community in Winnipeg, specifically, there’s only a handful of coaches, and two of them are female,” Naylor says.

She’s proud to be someone female bowlers can turn to, and the time she’s cut out of her busy schedule has been worth it. “In 2025 diversity is so important, especially in sport.”

Already, she’s having the champagne problems of having to compete against people she’s coached in order to earn a spot on Team Canada.

For Naylor’s next challenge, she is already preparing for the 2027 championships, which are going to be in Korea. It’s the biggest stage yet, promising to again make the Asper School proud, in what can best be described as a blockbuster sequel to this year’s championship.

“In Korea, it’s like hockey in Canada, but for bowling,” says Naylor.
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Through the Stu Clark Centre for Entrepreneurship, Marissa Naylor will be holding a webinar “Marketing Strategy for Startups” on January 30th, 2026. She will be exploring how early-stage entrepreneurs can build a strong brand, attract the right audience, and turn limited resources into meaningful results. Learn how you can register for her webinar.

For the full story, please visit CTV News.

While some see a series of routine facts, transportation scholars like Asper School MBA students Mario Petit, Maitha Alshamsi, and Geoffrey Hurd, see an opportunity.

They see that school buses should be the easiest type of vehicle to transition to a primarily electric power source. And it would make a huge environmental difference to do so.

Because their routes are short, and they’re at the central location for long periods of time, they can be charged often without needing a special, large power source. And because they use diesel in large quantities (not to mention, while transporting children) electrifying school buses would do huge good.

However, factory-built electric school buses remain too expensive for individual school divisions. The key question becomes, how do you find an affordable way to electrify. 

Convert or buy new?

Under guidance from their Asper School of Business’ sessional instructor in Supply Chain Management Dr. Robert Parsons, Petit, Alshamsi, and Hurd weighed the pros and cons of converting already-existing school buses from diesel to electric in an experiential learning opportunity.

The major assist at their disposal: the first school bus in Manitoba to be re-powered from diesel to electric.

The school bus itself was converted by Red River College Polytechnic students as part of their Electric School Bus Conversion initiative undertaken through the Vehile Tehnology and Energy Centre (VTEC). Dr. Parsons and the three Asper students were brought on to create a cost-benefit analysis.

In it, they show that for school divisions, obtaining new electric school buses is not economically feasible, as they cost in the neighbourhood of 3x the price of a comparable diesel bus. However, re-powering them is affordable and still benefits the environment.

Among their practical-minded solutions, they propose that as school buses face various wear and tear, they could convert to electric instead of replacing a diesel engine, thus saving on fuel while investing in sustainability.

They also examine how governments play a role in greenhouse gas reduction by offering incentive programs. If governments were create a $20,000 per bus incentive—modest in the transportation industry—it could relieve school boards of much of the financial risk and make their vision a reality.

Dr. Barry Prentice, Director of UMTI and Professor in Supply Chain Management at the Asper School of Business, was impressed by the students, whose report clearly showed a realistic path for the transportation industry.

“Achieving sustainable transportation has never been simple nor straightforward, requiring careful analysis and planning,” he said. “Solid work by the MBA students continues to exemplify the strengths of the Asper School of Business in identifying and validating realistic pathways toward a zero-emission future.”

A unique learning experience

Asper MBA student Geoffrey Hurd said that the opportunity to have the actual bus be a practical element in this study really helped him see past the theory of the classroom. It also allowed his team’s work to be realistic, and to have real-world applications.

Nathan Greidanus, Associate Dean, Professional Graduate Programs and Executive Education, at the Asper School of Business noted that the Electric School Bus Conversion project empowered Asper MBA students to create important work.

“Experiential learning is at the heart of the Asper MBA. When students collaborate with community partners on complex sustainability and innovation challenges, they deepen their skills and demonstrate the values that define the Asper School. Experiences like this shape the leaders Manitoba needs for the future,” he said.

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The University of Manitoba Transport Institute plays a highly important role in defining the direction of Canada’s and the world’s future scholarly research in transportation and logistics. Learn more here.

With one of the most flexible and adaptable programs in Canada, the Asper MBA program is designed to meet the market-driven needs of today’s industry professionals. Take the first step in transforming your career today

The continuing investments in Canadian ports are also largely container-focused, said Barry Prentice, a professor of transportation and supply-chain management at the University of Manitoba. This won’t work for potash, he said. And while Prince Rupert is increasingly a port that handles bulk shipments, it is only serviced by a single class-one railway.

For the full story, please visit The Globe and Mail.

Recently, students in the President’s Student Leadership Program (PSLP) have done both.

PSLP, running out of the James W. Burns Leadership Institute housed within the Asper School of Business—is a fully-funded, pan-provincial leadership program that selects up to 24 PSLP Fellows per year across all disciplines from Manitoba’s post-secondary institutions.

2025 saw the seventh cohort of students enter the program. After engaging in week-long leadership seminars and workshops, where they meet and have in-depth discussions with senior leaders across sectors and learn from subject-matter experts, the group breaks into teams of four. In consultation and then partnership with a community organization, each team designs a project that focuses on filling an identified need and making community impact.

“In each of the five projects this summer, students immersed themselves in a spirit of giving back, using their unique skills to find a community partner, design a project and contribute to community members,” said Suzanne Gagnon, Asper Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Research Programs and Director of the James W. Burns Leadership Institute.

“In addition, each group traversed complex issues that were often new to them, gaining valuable insights and honing a well-rounded set of tested leadership skill,” said Dr. Gagnon.

We detail each team’s story of community impact below.

ALLFOURONE: Stories Across Generations

Team ALLFOURONE created an “intergenerational bonding initiative,” forming meaningful connections between senior residents of a care home (reaching as high as age 103) and elementary school students (reaching as high as age 11).

They called it “Stories Across Generations.” Together, the team designed and facilitated an afternoon where students from Margaret Park School and Luther Personal Care Home could connect through activities like trivia, storytelling and conversation.

The team identified the need for this project when they observed that youth and seniors can both feel overlooked or misunderstood. As these sessions unfolded, Keji Preston (UM Bachelor of Arts in Psychology), a member of the team, said “you could truly feel the room fill with joy.”

“A simple question like ‘what was your favourite game as a child?’ could spark a conversation that had a student and a resident laughing like they were old friends” she said.

The team realized this was special—a true bridge where both generations felt seen and heard.

“This project was a powerful reminder of the value every person holds,” said Preston.

During her time with PSLP, she felt like she realized a fundamental truth about leadership. “It’s not about a title; it’s about the responsibility to identify a need and the courage to take the first step in addressing it.

“This program gave me the tools, the network, and the confidence to do that, and for that, I am immensely grateful.”

GOal Getterz: Weaving Dreams

GOal Getterz partnered with Rising Sun, an off-campus school program of Gordon Bell High School to provide a crafting workshop, that doubled as a seminar on seeing mental health through an Indigenous lens.

As the high school students crafted dreamcatchers, they also had an open dialogue, connecting with the youth about their journeys so far, their dreams, and how they can make a positive impact on their community.

In Indigenous culture, a dreamcatcher is a profound symbol of protection, consisting of a circle and a web. The web is woven to capture bad thoughts and nightmares, holding them until they dissipate with daylight.

One member of the team, Ashley Sinclair (UM Bachelor of Arts in Psychology), is a Knowledge Keeper, and led the discussions. Team member Nicole Herpai (UM Doctor of Philosophy in Community Health Sciences) said that with the easygoing environment of crafting, the students felt at ease, opening up and sharing personal stories.

After the workshop, the team created a manual for how to re-create their event. It includes an explanation of the importance of the workshop and how to do it in a good way while observing appropriate cultural practices. More than anything, it’s a spark—a spark to pay it forward to others, which is what great leaders do.

Team M.I.C.K. – “Soft skills” for University

No matter what subject you study at university, everyone who comes through becomes a true expert in one thing: how to survive university.

Team M.I.C.K. forged an alliance with the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba (IRCOM), to create an event where they could support Canadian newcomers with advice and “soft-skills” to get prepared for university.

Working with immigrants was something everyone in the group could relate to, as they each had either previous experience volunteering, or were a newcomer themselves.

Together with their deep collective knowledge of University, they hosted a preliminary event in August; the full event is planned for February 2026, when most will begin the application process.

During initial discussions with newcomers, group representative Kolby Wiebe (UM BSc in Chemistry) described a moment where they answered students’ questions about financial aid.

“When we saw the students realize that they may actually be able to afford going to university it was really cool,” Wiebe said. Once they understood it was a possibility, the group was flooded with eager questions.

Wiebe found PSLP to be a great opportunity to connect to the community in a way he wouldn’t have otherwise been able to.

“Getting outside the lab and interacting with motivated people across Winnipeg in all different positions really made me think about why I am doing the work I do and what impact it has,” he said.

Team M.A.C.C. – Supporting Newcomers on their Entrepreneurship Journey

If building a business is like building a house, how would you do it without a blueprint, or any way to source materials and equipment?

Entrepreneurship is hard. It’s even harder if you don’t know the local systems, resources, and tools in your toolbox.

Every member of team M.A.C.C. has connections to immigrant communities and identified this seemingly impossible task for newcomers who are aspiring entrepreneurs. Team representative Carolyn Wang (BComm [Hons.]) says they “thought it was important to give back since the resources available for newcomers helped us and our families.”

To help break the barrier, they connected experienced entrepreneurs and newcomers looking to start a business for virtual meetings where they could receive personalized advice.

They also created a guide—2025 Business Start-Up Guide for Manitoban Immigrants—which outlines the many resources available to entrepreneurs. It has gained impressive visibility on LinkedIn, expanding their audience and reaching an even larger community who can use and share the document all year round.

The Breakthrough Project – An Inspiration Fair for Indigenous Youth

Anthony Theriault’s (BComm [Hons.]) team was having a hard time coming up with a name, at first. They created a mission statement: “To build impact to contribute to daily life so people can live their best lives and flourish.” They decided on “The Breakthrough Project.”

Hence, their project became about breaking through: to Indigenous youth.

Partnering with Rossbrook House, an inner-city drop-in centre for youth, they created an event where youth and young Indigenous adults (guides) from a range of paths could share stories.

“Think of it as an inspiration fair” said Theriault.

While sharing a meal, guides and youth swapped stories. Afterwards, each member of The Breakthrough Project hosted a games table where they could personally connect with the youth.

“This was one of the best parts, getting to talk with the youth hands-on about their goals and passions” Theriault said. “We really wanted the youth to lead their own way, and that’s what happened!”

The interactivity of the event turned out to be its greatest strength. A teacher’s assistant told them “This was completely different from other external presentations. The youth got to explore their interests rather than being forced to listen.”

Everyone left the day feeling inspired, knowing they had created authentic connections with the youth. According to Theriault, rumour has it that this might just be the start of an annual tradition.

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The President’s Student Leadership Program, led by the James W. Burns Leadership Institute at the Asper School of Business is a fulfilling opportunity for students to develop a robust, real-world leadership toolkit. It is a transformative experience that builds valuable networks and skills for the next generation of changemakers. Applications to Cohort 8 of the PSLP opens on January 19, 2026. Click here to learn more about PSLP.

For the full interview, please visit CBC.

Hearing this a couple of times might just make you more interested in the tool. But what if you keep seeing this, popping up on different websites and in your news feed? Each time you see it, you start thinking more critically: wait, this technology is really new…and wait, in a space where everything is still up in the air, how did they determine it was the #1 deepfake-detection solution anyway?

At what point do you say to yourself, I’m not sure if I can trust this? When is it too much?

Asper Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Xiumei Li, recently published the article Entrepreneurial Market Leadership Claims, Cultural Resonance, and Investor Evaluations in Nascent Markets: The Goldilocks Effect in one of the most prestigious academic journals in the field, the Financial Times 50 (FT50)-ranked Journal of Management Studies to answer this very question.

She and her co-authors, Jade Lo (Drexel University), Derek Harmon (Michigan State University), and V.K. Narayanan (Drexel University), draw on insights from cultural entrepreneurship and psychology…with a key assist from a fairy tale.

The mere exposure effect

Before this project, Li was working on another study, sifting through data, when she noticed a pattern.

This original study was examining how entrepreneurs establish novelty and familiarity to influence potential investors.

She was looking through press release after press release from various entrepreneurial ventures and couldn’t help but notice—many of them were claiming they were a leader in their field, often in a nascent (new) market where evaluation criteria were not yet established (for example, a technology that is just being introduced to consumers).

“It’s not possible that everyone is a leader, right?” Li says. “In an early-stage market, the evaluation metrics are still being developed, and it’s very difficult to verify. Then I became interested in how investors evaluate these types of messages.”

Investors can make decisions that make, or break new entrepreneurial ventures. Companies therefore need to make the case that they are dependable and a good investment.

That’s where psychology came in. She began consulting classic social psychology papers about the mere exposure effect and the two-factor model—the idea that repetition boosts favorability at first but backfires when overdone.

“If you repeat a message three times, is it a good thing compared to five or more?” Li says.

Their study became about not what entrepreneurs were claiming, but how often they were claiming it—and how different levels of repetition shaped investor evaluations.

The Goldilocks Effect

By taking an innovative angle—frequency of the message, rather than the message itself—Li and her colleagues distinguished their research from other studies.

With their finger on the pulse on the classic social psychology literature, the team hypothesized that too little, or too much exposure to the market leadership claims would sway the investors away in a nascent market.

If there’s too little messaging, investors would experience a sense of uncertainty, and have a cautious reaction.

If there’s too much exposure to the claim, the research suggests that investors would clue into the fact that they’re being persuaded and resist the influence. It’s a movie that’s working too hard to make you cry.

However, if the claim is repeated within these goalposts—enough to have impact without overdoing it—individuals may experience the “truth effect,” the idea that as something is heard multiple times, it strikes a chord with you, and reduces any uncertainty you may have had—like a movie you get lost in, even though you know it’s pretend.

Their evidence included an archival study and an experiment. In the experiment, participants were exposed to fictional press releases with varying amounts of market leadership claims, then asked how likely they would be to invest.

Here, they found support for their theory in the form of an inverted U-shaped graph—showing that as claim frequency goes up in a nascent market, investor evaluations increase, plateau, and then go back down as the claim frequency gets too high.

The only thing left was to name this phenomenon.

Li says she can’t take credit for the name “The Goldilocks Effect”—that goes to her colleague Derek Harmon—but says “It adds more vividity—and maybe more people are interested in reading it.”

There are no bears or porridge in this paper, but the message stays the same: we’re always trying to find what’s just right, somewhere between too much and not enough.
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This article is only a small summation of the insights in Entrepreneurial Market Leadership Claims, Cultural Resonance, and Investor Evaluations in Nascent Markets: The Goldilocks Effect. You can learn more by reading the article online on Journal of Management Studies.

The Asper School of Business aims to expand the creation of global knowledge and engage in intellectual exploration to advance management research and practice. Our researchers’ scholarly work is regularly published in world’s most renowned outlets in the field.

Be part of this flourishing research culture and learn more about research programs in management (MSc and PhD) at the Stu Clark Graduate School.

“It’s a way of getting people to opt for those more expensive seats. You simply make the comfort differential greater,” said Dr. Barry Prentice, who heads the University of Manitoba’s transport institute. 

To read the entire article, please visit Canadian Press.

What’s one of the only places you can go grocery shopping and clubbing at the same time for free? Filipino grocery chain Seafood City. But the secret to the success of the pop-ups might be part of a larger trend. CBC’s Jim Agapito speaks with Dr. Divya Ramachandran, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Manitoba.

For the full interview, please visit CBC.