Wharton College at University of Pennsylvania WIMI
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FOR CORPORATE PARTNERS

WIMI translates cutting edge research findings into insights that companies can understand and use today through many different venues including:


Getting Involved in WIMI Research Projects


  • What types of questions are WIMI researchers investigating?


WIMI researchers are engaged in investigating a number of questions around interactive media, including:

-How effective are different forms online advertising (rich media, display, search)?


-What is the nature of information flow through a social network, and how can firms use such data to help forecast customer adoption of a new product or service?


-How  can companies use user-generated content to determine which products and services to offer?


-What are the costs of corporate data leakage through corrupt insiders,

malicious outsiders (e.g. hackers) and careless corporate practices, and what are best practices to cope with these growing trends?


-How do the answers to every one of these questions vary across different regions of the world?

 

  • How will my company benefit by participating in a WIMI research project?
Companies benefit from engaging in research in many ways. The goal of WIMI research projects is to develop rigorous answers to important questions in interactive media and to develop advanced analytical methods that can be used by firms to drive better decision making.  Corporate Partners participating in research benefit by getting early exposure to these new ideas and assistance with building these cutting-edge analytical capabilities, directly from the researchers who developed them.  Corporate Partners also gain substantial world-wide exposure through the publicity generated when new research findings are released.  In addition to early exposure to research findings, Corporate Partners also benefit throughout the research process, by engaging a regular dialog with some of the worlds foremost faculty experts in interactive media.

  • What types of data are WIMI researchers interested in?


Many WIMI-researchers use data that is provided by companies to test answer basic questions about how consumers respond and to demonstrate how newly developed analytical methods can be used by companies to drive better decision-making.  WIMI researchers use widely varying data types from transaction histories or subscription records to web logs, advertising impressions to social networks and other user-generated content, but the common thread is that the data always involves observations of individuals: individual users, individual households, individual consumers, or individual companies.

 

A newly emerging research area is the use of well-controlled experiments to learn even more about how users and consumers respond. There are currently several researchers in the WIMI scholar network who are interested in finding a partner who would be willing to execute experiments in the online space. Interested companies should contact Steve Ennen or Elea Feit.

 

  • How will my data be protected and controlled?


These days, privacy concerns are top-of-mind for most companies and WIMI Corporate Partners often ask how users' privacy can be maintained. Typically, this can be handled by appropriately scrubbing the data before it is released by the company. Beyond that, researchers are granted access to the data for research purposes only and may not distribute it beyond the research team. Data is stored and controlled according to WIMI data handling guidelines. 


Although the intent of most WIMI projects is broad dissemination of research findings through presentations and publications, Corporate Partners review all results prior to them being released, to ensure that the results are aggregated or masked in a way that protects the privacy of individuals who may be included in the data set and do not reveal any company proprietary information.