IBIT

Engages with industry to develop digital knowledge and talent

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Investigating the entrepreneurial potential of immersive applications

Ethan Berg wants to help people build new worlds — professional-quality immersive, 3D spaces and experiences — without any coding skills. Berg (FOX ’20) is the CEO and co-founder of the startup Agora World Inc which offers a drag and drop no-code design space to create spaces for the metaverse.

Berg and Agora won Temple’s Idea Competition in 2021 as well as the Digital Innovation Award from the Digital Innovation Foundry (DIF), which included access to talent and resources. Today, Agora’s no-code platform accommodates users of all experience levels, from professional designers to those with minimal design background, making it an accessible solution for creating professional-quality 3D content and immersive social experiences,” Berg says. “What used to take a team, investment, and months to create now can be created quickly with no code.”   Berg quickly saw the value of DIF talent and resources, to “study this space and get a better understanding of where we’re headed and where we can go.”

Over six months in 2022, the DIF team of Druvakumar Valugubelly (FOX MIS ’22) and Mitchel Zilbershteyn (FOX MIS ’24) supervised by Solon Moreira, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship applied Agora’s platform to explore commercial metaverse applications.

Moreira’s DIF team applied design science research to prototype solutions for three different business problems. The goal was to investigate applications with entrepreneurial potential that are technically and practically feasible for companies. And identify the requirements and resources that companies will need to enact an entrepreneurial metaverse strategy.

The team built three prototype spaces a mall, a neighborhood, and an outdoor concert venue. Visitors to these spaces might shop, go house hunting, or attend a music festival. Moreira explains that a real estate agent could use the neighborhood space to showcase homes in a planned development. Before the foundation of a new house is even poured, a potential buyer could look at the view from “their” balcony. “It was exciting for the Temple team to be part of something that will dramatically change and shape the world of business,” Moreira says.

The team presented Berg with valuable feedback, and he was impressed by the “amazing” spaces they built. Valugubelly says he enjoyed the chance to work with LiDAR 3D scanning for the Agora project. “This project helped me better understand how software iteration and testing work,” he adds. Zilbershteyn, says that DIF provides “a valuable connection to industry experts, and the opportunity to engage with professors on research.” “As we continue to evolve, collaborating with the DIF team has provided valuable insights, helping us refine our platform and better serve the diverse needs of our users,” Berg says.

The DIF project also generated new research. Moreira worked with Executive Director and Professor Munir Mandviwalla on a manuscript – “Exploring Entrepreneurship in the Metaverse: Design Requirements and Resources” – which has been accepted at the 18th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST 2023). Going forward, DIF is collaborating with Agora on additional research and is hosting an integrated industry-research workshop on the business application of metaverses, AR, VR, MR, and digital twins.

The mission of DIF, part of the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT), is to generate innovation by assessing, integrating, and prototyping digital technologies in collaboration with industry, startups, faculty, and students. See: https://ibit.temple.edu/DIF

Learn more about Agora at: https://agoravr.world/

A post pandemic outlook

Business and industry as we once knew it has changed. What was their “normal” is likely not coming back either.

As we move past the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s imperative that the many affected industries find a way to move forward too. But how do they do that?

That’s the question explored in “An industry perspective on major post-pandemic issues,” a new article that was recently published in MIS Quarterly Executive. The piece outlines seven practical recommendations for industry to consider in the wake of the pandemic.

The co-authors include Dinesh Desai, executive chairman and founder of Emtec, Inc., an IT consultancy firm; Linda Descano, executive vice president at Red Havas; Larry Dignan, editor in chief of ZDNet and editorial director of ZDNet’s sister site TechRepublic; Chris Kearns, senior vice president in Operations and Technology at NBCUniversal; Raghu Sankaran, chief information officer (CIO) and chief information security officer (CISO) at Scholastic, and IBIT executive director and Fox School Professor, Munir Mandviwalla.

The recommendations include:

  1. Digital transformation must remain a priority
  2. Business valuation of IT must shift assumptions
  3. Data is now even more central to business models
  4. Business continuity and operations planning require a fresh approach
  5. Remote work is a reality but management and tech need improvement
  6. Workforce recruitment and development face new challenges and requirements
  7. IT must play a central role in enabling societal and local responsibilities

The recommendations made in the article are far reaching. For instance, the co-authors argue that remote work should now be used as a recruiting tool and note that this could be especially impactful when it comes to acquiring and retaining IT talent. They also suggest that productivity and innovation could be increased by sharing critical performance data regularly with all employees.

“A lot of these topics came from our Digital Fireside Chats, which IBIT has been hosting since the pandemic started, Mandviwalla says.

“There are several things that make this article unique,” Mandviwalla says. “First, the recommendations reflect the experience and expertise of my co-authors. Typically, industry avoids getting involved in academic knowledge creation, yet this group was willing to take the leap. Second, the speed at which this article was completed and published was just not normal. Typically, these types of things take multiple years, but we all worked on it rapidly including the editor-in-chief and reviewers. The article was fast tracked for publication, going from conception to publication in less than 3 months. Lightning had to strike multiple times for this to work, and it did.”

Since its launch in March 2021, the article is one of the most-downloaded at MIS Quarterly Executive.

Students showcase data visualization and analysis skills at the Alexion Analytics Challenge

The Eighth Annual Temple University Alexion Analytics Challenge, organized by the Institute for Business and Information Technology, is a forum for talented students across colleges to showcase their analytic skills. This year’s Challenge, held in October, featured 300 competing students, all of whom presented analyses aiming to answer a single question: “What makes rare disease clinical trials successful?”

Sponsor Alexion Pharmaceuticals provided the data for the 114 participating teams to analyze over the course of the month; each team presented both analysis and an original visualization, which were judged by a panel of industry professionals. Twelve teams representing three colleges went on to the final round, where they presented their analyses to the judges, who announced the seven winning teams in November.

The winners were:

1st Place Analysis: Jake Green, Lauren Remy, Rohit Bobby

2nd Place Analysis: Sofia Spadotto and Madison Collins

3rd Place Analysis: Vittoria Fani Ciotti, Amanda Olsen, Kyle Miller, Michael Manieri

Honorable Mention Analysis: Aleksey Kravets

1st Place Graphics: Diana Westerfer and Serdar Kurt

2nd Place Graphics: Thomas Swanson, Chirag Bhatia, Christian Siegfried

3rd Place Graphics: Qiwen Tan

Honorable Mention Graphics: Javier Balleste and Brock Brones

“What intrigues me is seeing the evolution of problem-solving capabilities,” says data scientist Hope Watson, challenge engineer and judge representing Alexion at the event. Watson, a Temple alum, is also a former Challenge winner herself: In 2016, her team won first place on the Analysis track. (In fact, upon winning, Watson was hired on the spot by that year’s sponsoring company, Alexion.) “This year I had the privilege of creating and judging this event. I was impressed with the students’ submissions!”

Winners of the Graphics category, Westerfer and Kurt, incorporated hand-drawn images for graphics that felt like a personalized form of story-telling. “With data analytics you have to hit this perfect balance between getting all the important information out, and then actually getting people to listen to you,” Westerfer said. “One of the easiest ways to get people to connect with the story you’re trying to tell is through an engaging visual– it helps them connect the data to YOU and keeps the presentation personal and engaging.”

Meanwhile, the winning team for the Analysis track credited their win to a strategic research approach. Green said: “We realized early on that our analytical methodology would have to be directly tied to our definitions of scientific and monetary success. Only when we fully understood the question’s context did we move on to finding the answers in our data.”

Of course, creating a forum for students to use their data analysis and visualization skills to tackle this type of real-world business issue is exactly the aim of the Analytics Challenge. The competition also serves participants in other ways, offers Laurel Miller, Director.

“It’s an opportunity for students to learn, develop, and showcase their abilities to a room full of industry experts invested in the outcome of the presentation.”

“We are all happy with the result and will take the lessons learned with us throughout our future professional endeavors,” added Green.

 

Learn more about the Temple University Analytics Challenge.

See all of the winning entries here. 

View the photos