Project Details
[Return to Previous Page]Digital Twins for People in Business and Societal Roles
Company: International Society of Service Innovation Professionals
Major(s):
Primary: IE
Secondary: CMPSC
Non-Disclosure Agreement: NO
Intellectual Property: NO
ISSIP is a non-profit professional association for "Service Innovation Professions" from students to mid-career to retirees. ISSIP has over 1500 members, including 400 companies and universities in over 40 countries. Service is defined as the application of resources (e.g., for the benefit of another). Innovations positively (win-win) change stakeholder interactions at micro, meso, and macro scales in business and society - and inevitably create new capabilities, benefits and potential harms for stakeholders. Professionals in ISSIP are lifelong-learners who strive for problem-solving depth and communications breadth (T-shaped). Previously, PSU Learning Factory students helped ISSIP in 2023 by developing a playbook for using generative AI to create historical service innovation cases, including essay, images, videos, and html webpage layouts of elements, and also including ethical AI usage citations. As a next step after this successful project, ISSIP would like to explore the creation of digital twins to help ISSIP volunteers be more productive and able to have high quality interactions with more ISSIP community members. "A digital twin is a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronized at a specified frequency and fidelity. They use real-time and historical data to represent the past and present, as well as to simulate predicted futures." (Isaacs). To do this, we would like PSU Learning Factory students to build digital twins of themselves and evaluate the pros and cons, from a capabilities, benefits, and harms - service innovation perspective. This project will require the students to become familiar with O*NET and the distinction between an occupation and the ever evolving set of tasks and tools associated with an occupation. ISSIP would like to highlight student and other members efforts in building digital twins of themselves as service innovation case studies for the ISSIP website. A proposed sprint-based schedule will be outlined during project kick-off to provide initial direction. This project will prepare students to come into an organization and build a digital transformation plan focused on helping employees build digital twins of workers to augment worker performance. This includes factoring in some of the existing tools that employees might be using or could be using (simulations of processes in the business organization). Their analysis of ISSIP.org and sprint experiences could result in improved recommendations for doing such IE-oriented digital twin/digital transformation plans for organizations in general. PLEASE NOTE: Students should have already completed or be concurrently enrolled in IE 327 (Introduction to Work Design) and/or IE 453 (Simulation Modeling for Decision Support). Simio will be heavily utilized throughout the project, and prior experience is STRONGLY encouraged. Reference: Wakefield J (2022) Why you may have a thinking digital twin within a decade. BBC News Online. URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61742884. O*NET (2023) Detailed descriptions of the world of work. URL: https://www.onetonline.org. Isaacs D (2023) Evolution of the Digital Twin."
