Penn State's E-Business Research Center Continues Pushing

Penn State's E-Business Research Center Continues Pushing The Envelope

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA-Penn State's eBusiness Research Center established itself as a pre-eminent research center during its first year, and Executive Director Nirmal Pal expects the eBRC to become the premier national resource for content and information about e-business during 2002.

"There's no doubt that we have become internationally known for our leading-edge thinking and research on e-business," says Pal. The eBRC-a joint effort of Penn State's Smeal College of Business and the School of Information Sciences and Technology --promotes research by academics and practitioners on various aspects of e-business, with emphasis on governance and execution issues. The primary mission of eBRC is to foster, expand, and disseminate theoretical, empirical and applied research in e-business and to bring research insights to its supporting members and help them with e-business practice. It was a year ago when the University's eBRC officially marked its role in shaping the new economy and e-commerce with an "e-Business Dedication Day" on Wednesday, December 13, 2000.

Highlights from the past year include co-hosting with IBM the first-ever national forum on e-business research centers; and publication of the book, Pushing the Digital Frontier: Insights into the Changing Landscape of E-Business. Created under the auspices of the eBRC, Pushing the Digital Frontier contains in-depth analysis by renowned thought leaders from the corporate and academic worlds.

"We're already hard at work on the next book, 'The Power of One: Leveraging Value from Personalization Technologies, which is on schedule for publication in 2002," says Pal.
Other accomplishments that the eBRC will expand upon in the coming year include the eBiz Search Engine. The eBiz Search Engine is an experimental niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address various business and technology aspects of e-Business. The search engine crawls Web sites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts. For certain documents, the database only stores the hyperlinks to those documents. eBiz performs a citation analysis of all the academic articles accessed and lists them in order of their citation rates in academic papers (the most cited articles are listed first).

Pal expects both the eBRC's online eBusiness Self Assessment Tool and the eBusiness Instant Poll to grow in popularity during 2002.

"These online tools are providing instant feedback to businesses around the globe on a variety of e-commerce issues. Our Web site now attracts more than 100 visits per day and that number continues to climb," says Pal.

The eBRC's well attended "Speaker Series" program will continue in January with David Partridge, director of Intellectual Capital Development for IBM's Institute for Business Value. In addition, the eBRC is co-sponsoring a conference, "Accelerating Global Commerce Through Technology and Policy," which is scheduled to take place Friday, September 20, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.