In response to the demand for business data professionals, the College of Management of National Sun Yat-sen University launched the “Big Data Analytics for Business: Interdisciplinary Smart Innovation” program in 2019, with the aim of integrating big data into various fields and cultivating talents with both data analytics and business expertise. In order to promote the final course of the program, the College of Management held an Industry-University Cooperation Information Session online on December 23, 2022. In the opening speech, Professor Chou-wen Wang of the Department of Finance said that the course not only provides students with the opportunity to participate in actual projects, but also allows them to use real data and information science technology by applying them in the business field. He added that through analysis, big data can be valuable to both students and companies.
The Big Data Business Analytics Platform established by the College of Management not only introduces big data-related courses, it also provides many external learning resources as well as cross-industry and interdisciplinary exchanges and collaborative applications, with the hope of providing students with resources for independent learning and application and creating unlimited possibilities for academic and industrial innovation. Therefore, the information session especially focused on the resources of big data platform and shared the work and achievements of past students, in order to provide companies and students with clearer goals and directions when formulating future project topics.
In addition to introducing the Big Data Business Analytics Platform, the event also invited companies that have participated in industry-academia cooperation in the past to share their cooperation models and results. Participating companies included commercial data set manufacturer Yulon Nissan as well as Taishin Bank, which cooperated in the area of financial technology services.
The first presentation was made by Yulon Nissan, who said that through the past projects, students not only helped the company understand their human resources profile, but also helped the company identify special hidden characteristics of employees by predicting and analyzing employees’ potential to be promoted. This allowed them to invest training resources more precisely in order to improve the productivity of the company. At the same time, Yulon Nissan also explained the mode of cooperation with the College in the past and shared topics of future cooperation projects.
Professor Chou-wen Wang was the spokesperson for Taishin Bank. He explained the company’s operation profile and how past projects have used big data to achieve goals such as avoiding customer loss and cross-selling, as well as introducing future course topics. In addition, Professor Wang also shared his past collaboration with O Bank on industry-academic topics. He shared that the bank’s subsequent targeted marketing efforts to target potential customers with predicted results were more effective than their previous marketing strategy of random sampling, reaffirming the value and importance of business data analysis to companies.
In addition to predicting potential customers and analyzing human resources profiles, the field of business data also includes consumer image recognition applications. It is hoped that business data analysis can help companies to strategically simulate, optimize and make strategical decisions in order to achieve the real value of business data analysis.
At the end of the event, Professor Wang said, “Through these courses, we can create a win-win-win situation for the University, students, and companies.” The industry-academia collaboration not only allows students to use their academic knowledge to connect with their practical expertise, achieving “learning by doing, doing by learning,” but also allows companies to try out AI projects at low cost and discover company talents in the process. Students and companies can use big data together to solve real dilemmas faced by companies and create value for the companies, while the university can develop more diversified issues through interdisciplinary cooperation and apply business analytics in a wider variety of fields.
Event Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD_pnaGqc8I&feature=youtu.be
(Written by Pei-yu Kao, MBA in Business Administration / Edited by the College of Management)