Hidden in smaller academic journals, university research can be difficult to locate. Two professors at the University of Washington Business School are stepping up to share their work with both the academic and business communities.
While the Internet has made it increasingly easy to access university research, such studies remain difficult to find due to the non-mainstream nature of academic journals.
Suresh Kotha and Shiva Rajgapol of the University of Washington Business School have done something to make sure students and the general public alike have access to their research.
The two professors recently launched Netesteem.com, a website that provides access to their business research.
“We’ve created a lot of studies looking at what’s happening in the e-commerce space, and have gotten a lot of requests for papers,” says Kotha. “It made a lot of sense to assemble all of this so we can give it to the community.”
The research can be very helpful for business people and students alike. The research focuses on how dot.com companies create and sustain their competitive advantage, how dot.com and click and mortar firms create, manage, and exploit their brand and reputation and how financial and non-financial drivers (e.g., traffic, branding, and other intangibles) impact firm performance.
Currently the work is all from the University of Washington, but Kotha says that in the future they would like to incorporate other research and links to other research sites.
One feature that the professors plan on launching in the next few weeks is information on local pre-IPO companies.
“We’re going to be putting up a lot of information on pre-IPO firms, trying to describe some of them and what they do for the venture capital community, angel investors and the companies themselves,” says Kotha.
In the future, Netesteem.com would like to expand this service to a national level.
“Once we do that we are going to try to get colleagues from different Universities to collect data on their different areas like Austin and the Bay Area,” says Kotha. “This is information that is hard to get and we are trying to collect that information so we can make it available to people.”
