Knowledge@Emory is born

By Eric Rangus erangus@emory.edu

After many months of planning by the Goizueta Business School, Knowledge@Emory, a comprehensive online publication featuring in-depth articles on the newest business trends and the latest research, made its web debut last week.

The site is modeled after the University of Pennsylvania business school’s e-zine, Knowledge@Wharton, which launched in 1999. The two schools shared in the effort to create Knowledge@Emory.

“The opportunity to partner with Wharton and showcase our faculty’s research and new thinking made this a good business decision for Goizueta,” said business school Dean Tom Robertson. Robertson has several contacts at Wharton, and the effort sprung from those relationships.

Since last summer, Goizueta and Wharton have worked to bring Knowledge@Emory (http://knowledge.emory.edu) to fruition. The goal of the twice-monthly publication is to offer the expertise of Emory’s business school faculty to companies, entrepreneurs, academics and government officials in a cutting-edge way.

“This is a knowledge economy, so business leaders and professionals need access to leading-edge thinking and new ideas,” said Maryam Alavi, Knowledge@Emory director and Lucy and John Cook Professor of Information Strategy.

“Executives and professionals are faced with a litany of diverse problems with ever-changing dynamics,” Alavi said. “Their ability to respond quickly and effectively to these issues makes Knowledge@Emory the perfect educational tool they can access 24 hours a day.”

The content will feature the expertise of Goizueta faculty members, alumni and business leaders. For instance, business school professors Jeff Rosensweig, Dan Rodriguez, Diana Robertson, Douglas Bowman, Hendrik Bessembinder and Russell Coff are just a few of faculty featured in the first online edition. Other members of the Emory community are featured as well, such as Economics Professor Ujjayant Chakravorty.

Not all of the contributions are directly related to Goizueta. Knowledge@Emory’s April 26 edition also includes an interview with Mylle Bell Mangum, CEO of MMS Incentives, a Norcross-based provider of loyalty and incentive programs, who recently visited Goizueta.

At the end of each article, users are given several options: They can comment on the piece, click on one of web links for more information or—if a research paper or previously published work is associated with the article—click on an icon and download the material.

Archived information is separated into 14 categories, such as finance and investment, marketing, real estate, public policy and management and managing technology.

“This is a great vehicle to disseminate academic and research knowledge to the business community and translate it in a usable way,” Alavi said.

Registration is required to access many site amenities, such as the archive. Articles in the current issue are available to all users. The process is a simple one, though, requiring only a name and e-mail address. A more extensive questionnaire is optional.

“An unregistered user would not be able to take full advantage of what the site has to offer; you’ll only be able to obtain a very small portion of the reading,” said Julia Morgan, Goizueta director of corporate marketing. “Registration is quick, easy and free, and literally takes two seconds.”

Registered users also will receive an e-mail reminder about the publication of new issues that will include synopses of each story and hyperlinks to take users to the specific article.

“It’s so easy for all of us to forget to check [for updates], and users can glance at the content in a summarized form,” Alavi said.

A team of Wharton IT people collaborated with Emory IT personnel, led by Barbara Maaskant, to build the site here. The site makeup is very similar to that of Knowledge@Wharton; perhaps the most significant difference is that Emory’s screen background is green while Wharton’s is blue. All 14 subject categories are the same, and the two sites share a library. Wharton also will provide technical, editorial and administrative support to the site.

“The response we continue to receive for Knowledge@Wharton clearly indicates that business leaders want the knowledge behind the news,” said Robert Mittelstaedt, vice dean and director of Wharton executive education. “Expanding our reach by partnering with Goizueta is an extension of that service and will benefit the users of both sites.”

The website made its official debut at a launch party at the business school April 26. Representatives from each of the project’s four corporate partners, Mittelstaedt, President Bill Chace and more than 100 business school faculty, students and alumni attended the event.

The costs for running the site are picked up in part by the business school’s aforementioned corporate partners: Coca-Cola, Financial Times, KPMG and Siemens. In return, the companies’ logos are posted on the site (along with links to their homepages), and information will be distributed to partner and other companies’ executives and employees throughout the world.

“What that does for Emory is it promotes our brand globally,” Morgan said. “We’re fairly well known, but we’ve still got some growing to do.”