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From Toys to Tools: Exploring Virtual Worlds in the Classroom
Virtual worlds are transforming the way business operates by creating new templates for accomplishing tasks from training and collaboration to product design and marketing. In a new course offering from Emory University and its Goizueta Business School, “Virtual Worlds and New Realities,” students and faculty explore issues surrounding emerging types of virtual worlds and immersion technologies while participating as avatars in Second Life and other virtual world environments. According to Benn Konsynski, a chaired professor of information systems and operations management at Goizueta who co-taught the course with Emory Vice Provost for International Affairs Holli Semetko, the expanding use of rich immersion technologies is “creating unlimited opportunities for business.”
Virtual Worlds: Mapping a New Business Reality
Virtual worlds are poised to play an ever greater role in business, politics, and day-to-day life. Though less than one percent of the world’s population currently participates in virtual worlds, the actual number is higher than the number of Internet surfers in 1994, says Benn Konsynski, a chaired professor of information systems and operations management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and co-chair of a recent conference entitled, “Virtual Worlds and New Realities in Commerce, Politics and Society.” The conference invited academics, gamers, entrepreneurs, social scientists and information technology specialists to discuss the growth and future of virtual worlds such as Second Life and Kaneva. The technological demands and opportunities they present will lead to rich, immersive media, says Konsynski, transforming the business landscape both online and in the office.
Supporting Decision Making with the Power of Excel
Delving into the world of Excel and its various applications can be an explorative and, believe-it-or-not, fun way to enhance knowledge and productivity contends, Elliot Bendoly, an associate professor of information systems and operations management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. In his new book, Excel Basics to Blackbelt: An Accelerated Guide to Decision Support Designs, Bendoly provides a compilation of information he’s used to teach management courses cloaked in a user-friendly format that will help bridge the developers’ divide between the available basic reference materials and the more advanced programming guides. Notes Bendoly: “The reader who goes through the book as a novice to application development will come out with a strikingly novel way of thinking about solving problems in the real world.”
Do Innovations Ever Pay Off? The Value to Investing in Innovation
Management has often been criticized for an earnings-focused short term orientation in order to boost the firm’s stock price, while, unfortunately, reducing or delaying investments in risky, long term innovation projects. The underlying assumption is that stock markets do not value investments with long term payoffs. Not true suggests Ashish Sood, an assistant professor of marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and Gerard J. Tellis, a professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business, University of California, in their paper “Do Innovations Really Payoff? Total Stock Market Returns to Innovation,” forthcoming in Marketing Science, the top journal in the marketing field. Sood and Tellis have devised a new metric that will help businesses calculate the total payoff to an innovation project by assessing the stock market returns to the entire innovation project via event study analysis and, in turn, recognize the utter importance of preserving their R&D budgets.
Will IPTV Revolutionize or Further Fragment the Television Viewing Audience?
More than 50 years ago, CBS aired the first U.S. coast-to-coast color television program—coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade. But as TV and the Internet converge, the TV of today, along with its hundreds of channels and on-demand capabilities, may soon join CBS’s inaugural coverage as a bullet point in the annals of TV history. Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has the power to rock television viewing the same way music downloads changed the recording industry and the way we listen to music. Recently, a diverse panel of industry experts gathered at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School to discuss the recent progress made in the area of IPTV. According to event organizer Benn Konsynski, a chaired professor of information systems and operations management at Goizueta, IPTV “isn’t just about convergence of media; it’s about convergence of life practices.”
