Research Program on Digital Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategy (RPDIES)

The Research Program on Digital Innovation, Platforms, and Strategy uses quantitative analysis of large data sets and field experiments to study how to optimize the design of large-scale knowledge, innovation, and entrepreneurship platforms. RPDIES brings together methods from social and behavioral sciences, management, and applied sciences (particularly data science, computer science, and engineering). 

This research model relies on building data science, digital infrastructure and platform capabilities and supporting external research partner organizations in doing so. The model is largely staffed with professionally experienced and technically trained graduate students from Northeastern University across engineering, data science, business, economics, computers science, and information systems.  

Here are several initiatives and programs of our team:

We are always interested in innovating, building and researching smarter ways to organize platforms and digital organizations. Reach out if your organization would like to support graduate research projects.

Current & Past Lab Members

Program Managers

Research Assistants

Digital Ether + Physical Spaces Marketing Challenge

Data analysis identified roughly 1000 highly skilled individuals in modern digital marketing methods. Those individuals were invited to form teams in a two-stage challenge. In stage one, teams created (1) professional designs (2) an overll digital promotional strategy -- which would cover both a digital campaign and a digitized campaign in physical spaces. In stage two, 5 teams were selected to compete with each other in implementing their strategies (to promote an actual event). Data were collected from web analytics and QR code trails in physical spaces. Real time analytics tracked the competition. 

NUgig.tech

The technological "stack" across which organizations now need to deploy capabilities is becoming increasingly sophisticated. "Full stack" used to mean front-end and back-end. Today, all organizations--not just tech companies-- require a much wider range of specialized and multidisciplinary skills across data science, business, security, networking, cloud, digital design, digital marketing, robotics, embedded devices, technical sales, internet-of-things, communications and media, and so on. 

It's hard to quickly get the right talent and start working on a problem, particularly new problems and getting started. NUGig allows community members to tap into the "spare capacity" of highly skilled Northeastern community members, across tends of thousands of students, hundreds of thousand alumni and families, and thousands of Northeastern corporate partners. The purpose of this initiative is to create a smaller "unit of work" than full-time hires or coops -- at the levels of tasks, gigs, or problems-to-solve -- to allow managers  to start getting work done. Apart from getting work done, it is an opportunity to learn, connect, and build relationships and make connections within the formidable NU community.

The platform provide a context for research and experimenting with novel ways to allow supply and demand for highly-skilled problem solvers to find one another.

IoT Open Innovation Lab

The IoT Open Innovation Lab is a special initiative of RPDIES and Northeastern to deploy an IoT Open Innovation platform to enable innovation, experimentation, and development of IoT applications by Northeastern community members, solving problems for affiliated companies. The project is supported by collaborations with industry and the wider university.