IE Business School new EU Funded Project

IE Business School is part of the scientific consortium of the project DIGYMATEX ( GA/Nº/870578) that has received a 3.4MM€ grant from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program for joint research with partnering European universities intended to design tools for understanding and measuring the youth digital maturity.

The IE team is lead by Professor Álvaro Arenas, and completed by Professors Konstantina Valogianni and Luz Rello, all of them from the Information Systems and Technology Department that will lead the 4.5-year project set to start on February 1, 2020.

“Groups of universities, business schools, enterprises and relevant stakeholders in Europe join together to make a research proposal.”

“This is a competitive grant. So that means that groups of universities, business schools, enterprises and relevant stakeholders in Europe join together to make a research proposal,” Arenas explained. “So following the invitation of Aarhus University Denmark to join the consortium, we made a proposal on a project to study the digital maturity of children and teenagers.”

Aarhus University (Coordinator), University of Vienna, Freie University of Berlin, Athens School of Economics and Business Research Center, University of Amsterdam and Bonn University as well as five other institutions and companies such as IBM Denmark and Nofima are partners in  in the DIGYMATEX project.

“The research places IE Business School in the center of the arena of the Horizon 2020 project not only for academic excellence, but also for social impact in the real world.”
Konstantina Valogianni

The prestigious EU H2020 Program aims to finance high quality research projects that provide new solutions to societal challenges and drive innovation-lead sustainable growth.

“They choose to fund projects that are going to have an impact,” said Valogianni. “I understand why they were happy to fund the project. Because all kids use digital technology and not every parent or guardian has the know-how to guide its behavior online.”

The first tool researchers will develop is The Digital Youth Maturity Index (DYMI), followed by an automated tool to help in the application of the index.

“The idea is that the index has to be created by a multidisciplinary team. So we have got psychologists, medical doctors, information systems as well as computer scientist, we even have a company that deals with eating disorders,” Arenas explained.

Arenas said the team will collect data on the habits of children and how they use technology, as well as the impact of technology and cyberspace.  The collected data will help in developing the index, which will act as a measurement tool for classification and segmentation of user groups as well as a behavioral prediction tool based on machine-learning techniques.

“The research places IE Business School in the center of the arena of the Horizon 2020 project not only for academic excellence, but also for social impact in the real world,” Valogianni said.