Students Present Research at COINs15 Conference in Tokyo
M.B.A./M.Des. students Amanda Rosenberg and Sipra Bihani traveled over 6,000 miles to present their MBA 595 special topics project at the COINs15 conference at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, March 12-15.
The project, which applies social network analysis to better understand the emerging phenomenon of biohacking, was developed with their global team as part the Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) Seminar. The course was taught this past fall by Christine Miller, Clinical Associate Professor of Innovation.
“Attending the conference enabled us to become aware of the different, deep applications of the skills we learned in the class,” said Rosenberg. “Being able to listen to and talk with leaders in the field inspired new ideas for how we might be able to apply the classroom learning to future projects or dive further in our existing analysis. Furthermore, the inter-cultural experience gave us the opportunity to see wider variation of interests and approaches.”
The students identified two major benefits of working on a global team: learning to minimize cultural bias on the topic area and working with diverse skill sets.
“When researching online communities, we were looking at activity internationally,” said Bihani. “Having a team of people from different places and living in different countries allowed for more well-rounded input.”
Offered in partnership with MIT, Aalto University Helsinki, University of Cologne, and University of Bamberg, Germany, Miller’s seminar followed the COIN (Collaborative Innovation Networks) model of innovation, collaboration, and communication within and across global virtual teams.
Rosenberg and Bihani were two of the 18 IIT Stuart students in the M.B.A. and dual M.B.A./M.Des. programs, who, along with students from other participating schools, were working on a range of projects involving social media and trend analysis, predictive analytics, analysis of email networks, and viral marketing using web mining and dynamic Social Network Analysis tools and methods.
This spring, Miller, and students from her MBA special topics course Innovation through Project Oriented Learning: Telecommunications from Morse Code to the Cloud, attended the physical launch of the Project Oriented Learning Experience (POLE) program at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Windisch, Switzerland, February 8-15. IIT Stuart is the only business school of the nine universities in this term’s global collaboration.
