New Wharton website offers academic resources, insight

For years, business managers, students and top executives around the world have turned to hard copy journals to access the latest research from academia. But if Wharton School officials have their way, they will soon be logging on to the Knowledge@Wharton website -- a free, interactive clearinghouse for cutting-edge insight, commentary and information coming out of the University's elite business school -- located at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. "Knowledge@Wharton is a way for executives, students and the outside world to access the incredible range of knowledge that our faculty can cover," said Wharton Director of Public Affairs Chris Hardwick. "There are a lot of sites where you can get where the Dow is at, or when a merger will take place, but this site offers the knowledge behind the news." Launched last Wednesday, has already had a global reach. According to Mukul Pandya, the web-page creator and member of Wharton's public affairs division, nearly 2,000 people from 39 countries -- including Australia, Japan, Sweden and Russia -- have already registered to access the website and receive a bi-weekly e-mail newsletter. Knowledge@Wharton's "unique layered approach" and comprehensive search engine allows users to research perspectives on a wide range of management issues, including finance, marketing, human resources and business ethics -- with links to relevant sites, information and news stories. For example, a short summary of Operations and Information Management Professors' Eric Bradlow and David Schmittlein's research about commonly-used Internet search engines appears on the site's front page. Interested users can then follow a link to an article which puts the complex study into everyday terms. And users who want even more detail can access the underlying research, as a copy of Bradlow and Schmittlein's working paper is available on the site. Other links will connect users to the search engines themselves. By next year, officials anticipate users will have access to more than 2,000 working papers via the site. "It fits into Wharton's educational mission to maximize the impact of research," said Pandya. "In the past it was difficult to do because academic research was limited to academic publications. By creating Knowledge@Wharton, we are now then able to communicate the results [to the general public]." However, the website also serves as a promotional newsletter for the business school -- a mechanism to reach the more than 70,000 Wharton alumni worldwide and to market the school's image as a leader in business education and research. Other stories include interviews with leading Wharton faculty -- complete with links to Amazon.com to purchase their books -- summaries of recent campus speeches and faculty members' commentary on current business trends. Currently, the site features Finance Professor Jeremy Siegel's analysis of the current stock market craze, while another article highlights Warren Buffett's remarks to the University community in April. According to Pandya, the idea for the newsletter developed when he joined public affairs division last February to produce a general newsletter for the business school. But after exploring various options, he decided that going on-line was the right approach. "Wharton already had 30 newsletters, and the knowledge base [of research] was too broad," Pandya said. "People had talked about a centralized research depository for many years, and Knowledge@Wharton gave us a compelling reason." Pandya then teamed up with two technology firms -- ISB Interactive and Fesco Consulting -- to design the site and its search engine. Its content will be updated bi-weekly by Pandya and other members of Wharton's public affairs division.

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