2 research outputs found
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On your marks, headset, go! Understanding the building blocks of metaverse realms
In 2011, Business Horizons published the ‘social media honeycomb’ paper to help managers and scholars understand what was, then, a new form of media, its various platforms, and how to engage with it and learn to use it. Today, we face similar challenges and opportunities with the metaverse as we try to discover how to attract, enable, serve and capture value from users in some form of virtual world. In this article, we introduce the concept of a ‘metaverse realm’ (i.e., a specific type of metaverse space and community) and present the metaverse honeycomb model to explain the functionalities and affordances for different metaverse realms. We present two applications of the honeycomb model to show how different attention to immersive functionalities can characterize different metaverse realms. To conclude, we outline how the model could be used to strategically evaluate metaverse realms in terms of their external fit (i.e., the who-what-how of realms), internal fit (i.e., the trade-offs and synergies of realm functionalities), and life-cycles (i.e., roadmapping and directing realm evolution).</p
“Real impact”: challenges and opportunities in bridging the gap between research and practice – making a difference in industry, policy, and society
Achieving impact from academic research is a challenging, complex, multifaceted, and interconnected topic with a number of competing priorities and key performance indicators driving the extent and reach of meaningful and measurable benefits from research. Academic researchers are incentivised to publish their research in high-ranking journals and academic conferences but also to demonstrate the impact of their outputs through metrics such as citation counts, altmetrics, policy and practice impacts, and demonstrable institutional decision-making influence. However, academic research has been criticized for: its theoretical emphasis, high degree of complexity, jargon-heavy language, disconnect from industry and societal needs, overly complex and lengthy publishing timeframe, and misalignment between academic and industry objectives. Initiatives such as collaborative research projects and technology transfer offices have attempted to deliver meaningful impact, but significant barriers remain in the identification and evaluation of tangible impact from academic research. This editorial focusses on these aspects to deliver a multi-expert perspective on impact by developing an agenda to deliver more meaningful and demonstrable change to how “impact” can be conceptualized and measured to better align with the aims of academia, industry, and wider society. We present the 4D model - Design, Deliver, Disseminate, and Demonstrate - to provide a structured approach for academia to better align research endeavors with practice and deliver meaningful, tangible benefits to stakeholders.</p