Future Edelman Impact Award

If you have attended an INFORMS Business Analytics Conference in the past six years, you may have met or noticed a significant number of students in attendance from Purdue University’s M.S. in Business Analytics and Information Management (MS BAIM) program. Since the 2017 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference in Las Vegas, nearly 250 MS BAIM students have presented 80 posters showcasing work they have done with companies. In years when there was a poster session competition, these students demonstrated the quality of their work by winning the competition three times and placing four times. From an academic director’s perspective – a position I have served in capacity since 2018 – getting analytics and data science students involved in experimental learning projects with companies and participating in case competitions or hackathons are normal business. We all do it. The primary reasoning is to ensure our students practice their skills outside the classroom curriculum and hopefully add another experience they can potentially showcase to employers later.

Purdue’s MS BAIM program began residentially in 2016 when I began my Purdue journey as a clinical faculty member. With just one cohort in the books, CIO magazine listed us as the number one data science program among some very respectable programs [1]. MS BAIM has been able to improve program outcomes even as we scaled from 20 students to more than 100. For example, our placement rate and average starting salary has improved year on year, from 95% placement in our first class in 2017 to 100% of the past three of four classes. Starting salaries in our program began at $81,000 in 2017 and are well over $100,000 from the past two classes. This year, Study International named the Purdue MS BAIM program as one of four dynamic business analytics programs [2], and our latest average starting salary of $121,632 likely had a bit to do with that. For the past few years, U.S. News & World Report, probably the most well-regarded ranking entity, has ranked the MS BAIM program ninth among all graduate business analytics programs.

INFORMS has also noticed our outcomes and community involvement over the years and recognized the Krannert School of Management department as a finalist for the 2022 UPS George D. Smith Prize. Our faculty, alumni and corporate partners could not be prouder of what has been accomplished and the position we find ourselves in today. The question one might be asking is how can we do better for our students and their outcomes?

Urge Students to Join Professional Societies

From my perspective, one of the key reasons we have continued to improve over the years is because of our intentional focus on getting our students involved in professional communities such as INFORMS and professional conferences such as the INFORMS Business Analytics Conference. Many of our students join the INFORMS Data Mining and Analytics Societies during their program, and we provide them financial support to attend the Analytics Conference each spring. The student registration cost alone has been around $680 per student, but bulk registration discounts have been available if you discuss with the INFORMS Meetings department. Although the cost can seem high, it’s worth every penny, and I suggest making a case to fundraise or budget for it in your program (as we do at Purdue). The Analytics Conference has been hosted in Las Vegas; Baltimore; Austin, Texas; and most recently, Houston, and it will be held in Colorado in April 2023.

Our students love attending the Analytics Conference. Purdue is located in West Lafayette, Ind., a beautiful, rural college town where there are not many employers for students to showcase how their latest integer programming model transformed a company’s bottom line. There is no way we could replicate that conference experience on campus, with nearly everyone in attendance being a practitioner, consultant or leader in the analytics and data science space. Every year the students who attend tell us it was the most beneficial professional experience of their program. In 2018, 25% of our placements came from connections made at that year’s conference or career fair. From the 2022 conference, 96% of our students who attended were satisfied with their experience and would recommend that future students attend. Our students averaged almost three interviews at the INFORMS Career Fair, held during the Analytics Conference. The whole experience is a perfect way to culminate a graduate analytics experience.

Another thing we realized that we cannot replicate on campus or virtually is the opportunity for our soon-to-be graduates to network and participate at the Edelman Gala. The Franz Edelman Award is the top achievement in advanced analytics, operations research and management science. This award is analogous to the Nobel Prize but for the highest achievement in the field of applied analytics. The top entities in the world compete for this award each year; recent winners include Chile (if you haven’t yet, watch the award celebration [3]), U.N. World Food Programme (2021) and Intel Corp. (2020), among others, and the estimated cumulative benefits from Edelman finalist projects are nearly $300 billion! Our student participants get to meet these leaders. In 2021, I was fortunate to serve as an Edelman finalist coach for the Memorial Sloan Kettering team [4]. This experience led to the idea to begin the MS BAIM Future Edelman Impact Award competition [5].

Nurturing Future Edelman Winners

The goal of the MS BAIM Future Edelman Impact Award is to inspire students to lead their future client or organization to apply to be a real Franz Edelman Award winner, to be the “best,” which I define as an Edelman winner. Inspired by real competition, the students are tasked to use their Industry Practicum (capstone) course project and deliver empirically supported work that can be understood by the layperson and have measurable impact. The measurable impact part is typically “potential impact,” given the short 12-week duration and scope limitations that you would expect from a university course. From the students’ perspective, they often want to jump right into the technical work and some have tunnel vision on that initially, but one of the greatest lessons learned is really having them step back and see how important it is in practice to follow a structured process to deliver a solution that satisfies the business need. We have deliberately followed INFORMS Certified Analytics Professional (CAP) Job Task Analysis (JTA) tasks for all projects to help students understand the many caveats they need to consider and questions to ask their stakeholders. In the first round of the Future Edelman Competition, all teams must make a short, five-minute video presentation of their work. We have several corporate partners judge and score the projects to identify the top three projects that will make it to the final round. The rubric the judges use is as follows:

E-del-man Impact Evaluation Rubric

• Empirical
  • Capable of being verified or disproved by observational or experimental research by following a structured step-by-step approach from data to decisions.
  • Is there a technical innovation in the project? Innovation may stem from the creation of new design and methods, as well as the application of existing methods to new problems or new environments.
• Delivery
  • How does the solution provide recommendations, decision support, strategy or abilities in the context of the business need?
  • Does or can the solution scale? The capacity of the solution to be changed in size or scale for use or production across a range of capabilities.
  • Is this work portable to other applications or industries?
  • What political, technical and managerial challenges had to be overcome in completing the project so it could be deployed, used or considered for future integration?
• Layman
  • Is there a balance of rigor, technical jargon and layperson language so any audience can appreciate the work performed and its takeaways?
• Impact
  • What are the major quantified (e.g., dollars saved, revenue increased) and nonquantified (e.g., process streamlined, customer satisfaction improved) impacts of the work?
  • How important was the work to the client?

Once the top three teams are identified, they work with a videographer to create a three-minute video that would appeal to a wider, general audience. This is similar to when real Edelman Award finalists would work with their marketing team to create a high-level pitch video about their project. A great example is the first three minutes of the Memorial Sloan Kettering team submission from 2021 [4]. In our student competition, the Purdue marketing team puts each team’s pitch video on a website [5] and the students have one week to share the competition with others. After one week, whichever team has the most video YouTube “likes” is named the winner.

This process allows the team members to share their work with LinkedIn networks, highlighting their presentation skills. It also highlights the MS BAIM program and expectations for future industry partners collaborating with Purdue. This year’s winning project was “A Hierarchical Approach and Analysis of Assortment Optimization” by Utkarsh Bajaj, Aaron Chen, Prerana Das, Dhruv Shrivastava and Toolika Agrawal, who collaborated with a national retailer. According to Das, “We anticipated each of the company’s stores can increase its profits on average about $138,000 per year by implementing the team’s product assortment recommendations, which could add up to more than $6 million across the 5,000 stores the team analyzed.” In just one week, the team’s three-minute project video was viewed 3,372 times and had over 1,100 likes [6].

The second-place project, which had 1,722 views and 775 likes, was “IP Detective – Patent Infringement Detection Using BERT” by Buyang Li, Gokul Harindranath, Hrohaan Malhotra, Jonathan Mathai, Lakshay Vohra and Puja Gupta [7]. This team collaborated with a healthcare research and development partner with the goal to more efficiently identify patent applications that may be infringing the company’s patents. This had potential to save legal review costs by prioritizing the most likely infringers but could have broader impacts to also identify plagiarism.

The third-place project, “An Automated A/B Testing and Measurement Framework” by Achintya Acharya, Padma Dwivedi, Akshay Jayan and Amit Zutshi, had 670 video views and 113 likes [8]. The team worked with a data science consulting company to help its data science team create a tool to more efficiently design and evaluate A/B tests for clients. According to Dwivedi, “It was challenging to compress a three-month journey into a three-minute video that emphasized the benefits of the project rather than the data analysis, but that skill is essential to communicate the value you can bring to any person you speak with.”

Winners of this competition shared a $1,000 prize and each received a glass trophy, but they also have a wonderful project to showcase to employers that demonstrates their ability and potential to effectively communicate to a leadership team or client. As leaders and directors of analytics programs, one of the best things we can do for our students is proactively get them involved in professional societies such as INFORMS. Once they leave us for bigger, better things, they’ll need a community to help them continue to grow and stay abreast of ever-changing best practices and better opportunities for them to make an impact. I also believe it is our responsibility to coach our students and graduates to be the “best,” and here at Purdue, that means striving to see our graduates stand on the Edelman Gala stage one day. Boiler up!

References

1. https://www.cio.com/article/222512/top-10-data-science-master-s-degree-programs.html
2. https://www.studyinternational.com/news/mba-programmes-producing-agile-business-leaders-in-a-global-market/
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGCpwkZBCjE
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895M6j5KjPs
5. https://krannert.purdue.edu/masters/business-analytics-and-information-management/student-experiences/future-edelman-impact-award.php
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy34ORvtCUU
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckoEaUDDf8E
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9AFIovcDXo