The 2023-2024 Gary L. Lilien ISMS Practice Prize has been awarded to Saiquan Hu (Hunan University, China), Juanjuan Zhang (MIT), and Yuting Zhu (National University of Singapore) for their work “Sales Automation” by the Chairman of the Judges and ISMS VP of Practice, Prof. Lan Luo. 

On behalf of the author team, Prof. Yuting Zhu reported a deep-learning-based recommender system they have developed for new salespeople at a major insurance company in China that managed over 100,000 sales professionals. Low productivity among new sales agents is a common problem in sales force management. Prof. Zhu and her coauthors developed a model that learns from experienced salespeople’s transaction records to help new salespeople identify suitable customers. The model is designed to actively learn from “missing by choice” data, such as experienced salespeople’s own failures, which are prevalent but often not recorded in the company database. The authors validated their method using sales force transaction data from their client company. The author team showed that their method outperforms common benchmarks while being easy to implement. Their recommender system has started to be rolled out at the client company via a mobile app, with a one-third organic adoption rate among sales professionals upon launch. 

 The other finalists (in alphabetical order) were: 

• Christopher Amaral (University of Bath), Ceren Kolsarici (Queen's University), Iina Ikonen (University of Bath), and Nicole Robitaille (Queen’s University) for “Motivating Sustainable Energy Consumption Within Organizations: The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral Insights”
• Greig Cowan (NatWest Group), Salvatore Mercuri (The University of Edinburgh), and Raad Khraishi (NatWest Group) for “Modelling Customer Lifetime Value in the Retail Banking Industry”.
•  Yixin Tang (DoorDash), Yicong Lin (DoorDash), and Navdeep Sahni (Stanford University) for “Business Policy Experiments Using Fractional Factorial Designs: Consumer Retention on DoorDash”.

All four finalists benefitted from the feedback from Gary Lilien and John Roberts at their rehearsal. Along with Prof. Lan Luo, the judges for the competition were: 

• Nicholas Chu, CEO and Founder, Sinorbis & Professor of Practice, UNSW Business School 
• Steve Cohen, Co-founder, In4mation Insights, LLC 
• Tamara Howe, CMO, SunRice Group 
• Wendy Mak, CMO, MUFG Pension & Market Services 
• Koen Pauwels, Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Northeastern University 
• Olivier Toubia, Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University 

The Award competition took place on June 27 at the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Conference hosted by UNSW in Sydney, Australia. 

Established in 2003, the Gary Lilien ISMS-MSI-EMAC Practice Prize is awarded for an outstanding implementation of marketing science. The method used must be sound and appropriate to the problem and organization, and the work should have had a significant, verifiable, and preferably quantitative impact on the performance of the client organization. Gary Lilien (PhD 1973, Columbia), a long-time faculty member at Penn State University and before that MIT, is a scholar/educator who focused his career on bridging the gap between research and practice in OR/MS and marketing science.

Past papers describing these marketing science implementations are available in the journal Marketing Science. Videos of past finalists and winners are available at http://lilienpracticeprizevideos.org/ and on the dedicated YouTube channel, where the above finalists will soon be available. 

Inquiries: Lan Luo (lluo@marshall.usc.edu) Vice President of Practice at ISMS 

Click here for a list of past winners.

Call for Submissions

The 2024 Gary L. Lilien ISMS-MSI Practice Prize Competition

The INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) solicits entries for the 2024 Practice Prize Competition, the culmination of which will take place at the:

2024 ISMS Marketing Science Conference

Goal:  The goal of the Practice Prize is to highlight and celebrate outstanding marketing science work that has had significant organizational impact.

 Prize Committee:  The Prize Committee will be chaired by Professor Lan Luo (Vice President Practice, ISMS). 

 Eligibility:  The Practice Prize is awarded for outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. Prior publication of the work in any peer-reviewed journal does not disqualify it, and several past finalists and winners were published before the prize. We also welcome submissions that are working papers, regardless of whether the paper is under review or not. Entry to this competition does not preclude the paper to be submitted/published in any journal of the authors’ choice.

The methods used in the paper must be innovative, sound, and appropriate to the problem and organization, and the work should have had significant, verifiable, and preferably quantitative impact on the performance of the client organization. Historically, two types of entries have been recognized: (1) a history of successful applications across time and/or organizations and (2) a single, impactful application.  For the latter type of entry, the work should normally be completed within the five-year period prior to the year of the competition: work done between July 2018 and June 2023 will be eligible to enter the 2024 competition.  Anyone is eligible to enter except members of the judging committee.

Entry and Details:   Entrants must submit:

·       a 500-1000 word Abstract of the work, and

·       An Impact Statement, a supplementary summary of what was accomplished and its organizational impact in enough detail (normally 500-1000 words) to judge the appropriateness of the work for the competition.

·       Supplementary technical material that provides sufficient technical detail to permit the Prize Committee to judge the technical merit of the work. Completed working paper or published work is also welcome. 

 Usually, three or four competition finalists will be selected from amongst the entries. 

 Finalists will present their work at the 2024 ISMS Marketing Science Conference and the judging will take place immediately thereafter. The winner (or, in unusual circumstances, winners) will be announced at the Conference.

For a summary of some previous Finalists see Luo and Pauwels (Marketing Science 42.1 (2023): 6-9) https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/mksc.2022.1412

Timetable

1. Send your drafts for feedback*:     Ongoing till December 31, 2023

2. Submissions due:                           January 8, 2024

3. Finalists notified:                            February 15, 2024

4. Finalist Papers due:                        April 15, 2024

5. Feedback on final submissions:      May 16, 2024

6. Presentations at the 2022 ISMS

     Marketing Science Conference     June 2024

* If desired, the Chair of the committee will help guide potential entrants on how to develop the most compelling and rigorous entry, how to obtain client support and endorsement or address any other questions they might have. 

Examples:  To view presentations from past finalists and winners, see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrS2aW6TiebaWVMjGGFH8oQ/featured

Published articles of previous finalists can be found in various issues of Marketing Science.

Direct questions about the process or eligibility to the Chair of the Practice Prize Competition (lluo@marshall.usc.edu) or Gary Lilien (Glilien@psu.edu). If you feel as though you have an impactful piece of research in an industry setting but are uncertain if it is appropriate to the Prize, please do not hesitate to contact me or Gary.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Lan Luo

ISMS Vice President – Practice

September 2023