Coming Back from COVID

When COVID-19 reared its ugly head in early 2020, an onslaught of uncertainty pummeled the world as we know it. That’s when the suits and number crunchers stepped up their game, especially here at the Chambers College of Business and Economics.

As a land-grant institution, West Virginia University commits to advancing education, healthcare and prosperity for all by providing access and opportunity; by advancing high-impact research; and by leading transformation in West Virginia and the world through local, state and global engagement.

Whether it be aiding affected small businesses, developing new tools to combat coronavirus or contributing to the statewide PPE efforts, the Chambers College lives and breathes the land-grant mission to impart its imprint on all people.

Colin McIntyre, a mechanical engineering student and member of the HIT Lab team, observes a robot that can be used in hotels to advise guests about COVID-19 guidelines. McIntyre was involved in the lab's Hygenkey and robot projects.

“There are a lot of touch tools out there that are either brass, plastic or stainless steel. I hate to say it but many of these are on the market to make money off the fear of COVID. We never wanted to do that. So at the HIT Lab, we researched copper and found that COVID-19 stayed on it for less than four hours, whereas on stainless steel and plastic, it could be on there for up to five days.”
- Ajay Aluri

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The Greatest HIT

As founding director of the Hospitality Innovation and Technology (HIT) Lab, Ajay Aluri wants to change the perception of the hospitality and tourism world. Many see it as an industry not riding the cutting edge of innovation with low-paying jobs and unskilled workers.

Not so fast.

When you think of making dinner reservations, purchasing tickets for entertainment or checking in to a hotel, those actions are technology-driven, Aluri said.

“That’s where I come in,” said Aluri, also an associate professor of hospitality and tourism. “I have backgrounds in computer science, international business and hospitality, and all of those things blend together. However, I think the hospitality industry is lagging behind in the technology.”

Theme parks, casinos and the gaming industry all contribute to hospitality and tourism, and when COVID-19 hit the United States, these services were severely altered and remain so to this day. With hotels, restaurants, entertainment and any normal semblance of luxury and recreation on hold, 2020 turned out to an opportune year for the industry to play catch up.

What could Aluri and his students do to help the industry plow ahead?

As the threat of contracting the virus became all too real, Aluri and his students in the HIT Lab developed a copper touch tool with antiviral and antibacterial qualities. It took 25 designs and countless hours of 3D printing, but the team got a final design down pat. It’s called Hygenkey – a perfect tool to carry around, especially if traveling or pushing elevator buttons and pulling doors in public places like hotels. Hygenkey touch tools are touchscreen compatible and users can minimize contact with kiosk and touchscreen devices.

“There are a lot of touch tools out there that are either brass, plastic or stainless steel,” Aluri said. “I hate to say it but many of these are on the market to make money off the fear of COVID. We never wanted to do that. So at the HIT Lab, we researched copper and found that COVID-19 stayed on it for less than four hours, whereas on stainless steel and plastic, it could be on there for up to five days.”

Hygenkey has been tested by partners in WVU Medicine, Marriot Morgantown and Visit Mountaineer Country, to name a few, Aluri said.

It also has an ergonomic two-finger handle design, unlike other tools on the market. This means it’s sturdier and more versatile than other tools that struggle or can’t open heavy, commercial doors.

More impressive is that students helped developed the tool, Aluri said. Each semester, up to 25 students volunteer to work in the HIT Lab, and it’s open to students from all disciplines.

Hygenkey is not all the HIT Lab has accomplished in response to COVID-19. Researchers have also developed software aimed for use in robots in the hotel industry.

“We are programming the robot to actually talk to customers,” Aluri said. “You might go into a hotel and you can ask the robot about the protocols in place there. We also want the robot to detect if people are wearing masks and to remind them of social distancing. We can even program them to compliment people on their masks.”

Hotels may lean toward this trend, Aluri said, as it cuts down on person-to-person interaction, limiting COVID exposure.

The HIT Lab is also testing a contactless interactive mobile app for the service industry that will promote a safe customer experience for patrons of small and independent businesses.

Courtney Epling (pictured right), a hospitality and tourism management student and member of the HIT Lab team, interacts with a robot that utilizes software developed by the lab.

Marketing amid a pandemic

Every spring semester, Laurel Cook and her Marketing 389 students take on Morgantown-area small businesses as clients for a Google Ads campaign, a project aimed at boosting their online presence and brand awareness. It also gives the students experiential learning – in other words, real-world experience.

Needless to say, the spring of 2020 instilled new meaning into their campaign, with small businesses struggling to stay afloat.

Cook, assistant professor of marketing, posted on a Facebook community group to see if any local businesses or nonprofits were interested in plugging a vacancy left by a former client, which closed its doors before COVID struck.

She got 89 inquiries.

“I couldn’t send these people up the river,” Cook said. “At first I tried tackling the advertising myself. But then I knew I wouldn’t have the time or money to pay for it myself. So I reached out to some colleagues and before I knew it, it blew up.”

She turned to the WVU community, which answered the call. Colleagues in the Chambers College (such as the Encova Center), Prospect and Price Creative, the Reed College of Media and University Relations volunteered time, effort and money to take the businesses as clients.

Businesses and nonprofits including Gibbie’s Pub & Eatery, a downtown Morgantown staple since 1989; Johnston Equipment, a family-owned farm and heavy machinery company; and Operation Welcome Home, a job placement service for veterans, utilized Cook’s services.

When Cook joined the Chambers College in 2014 after spending time in the marketing world, she lobbied to teach a course covering basic marketing and statistical concepts relating to online tools and platforms, including websites, email marketing, search engine marketing and social media. The Google Ads campaign is one major component of the course.

An ultimate goal, Cook said, is to land clients on page one of Google search results. For instance, if a new Italian eatery opens in Morgantown, it likely won’t show up on the first page of Google results if you search for “Italian eateries near me.”

How successful was her class in bolstering online visibility?

One measure of success is the click-through rate, or ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page or ad.

Globally, an average click-through rate is 3.5. For Cook and her students’ clients, it shot up in the double digits.

Mike Gainer, owner of Gibbie’s, said he is grateful for the assistance and realizes that, perhaps, this was a wakeup call to running a business in the 21st century. Gibbie’s already had a Facebook page but it was infrequently monitored, and its website needed a refresh.

“Dr. Cook and her students helped us achieve more of an online presence and offered many suggestions along the way,” Gainer said. “We’ve learned that it’s helpful to have many levels of online marketing and not depend on just one source, like Facebook, for getting the word out.”

The ad campaigns are funded through a Google grant, in addition to each student contributing $50 of his or her own money. There’s no textbook, so that’s the only student expense, Cook said.

One client used his Google Ads campaign to increase his sales for the quarter by 25 percent and another client was awarded a $10,000 nonprofit ad grant from Google based upon their experience with the Google Ads campaign. Another nonprofit was able to double spring donations and exceed event registration for a fall 2020 fundraising event.

And Cook is happily continuing the project this spring (2021).

Leading by example

Businesses throughout the state had another resource to tap into at the Chambers College in 2020: The Encova Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

An added bonus?

Anna Carrier, the Community Business Program lead for the Encova Center, could relate to those small businesses struggling.

Carrier, a Morgantown native and Chambers College alumna, opened Morgantown’s first and only cupcake bakery, The Cupcakerie, in 2011 with her business partner Janet Williams.

“We (Encova) were on the phone with businesses around West Virginia from the very beginning (of the pandemic),” Carrier said. “Many businesses had to close, mine included. I was closed for seven weeks. So we needed to think outside of the box and we started doing webinars and utilizing the resources from within the Chambers College.”

Carrier reached out to her colleagues in the Chambers College and nearly 50 faculty and staff teamed up with the Encova Center to provide a Small Business Assistance Program.

The program assisted nonprofits and small businesses in the region by offering free services such as guidance with loan applications, marketing, finances, business planning and more. Those services, provided remotely, were in partnership with the Small Business Administration and Small Business Development Center.

“We had over 60 businesses from 22 counties in the state,” Carrier said. “We actually helped two businesses open in the midst of everything, so we’ve gotten some exciting success stories.”

One of those businesses turned out to be a yoga studio that, although it could not open its physical space, gathered a large virtual following.

And much like Cook’s marketing class, Carrier and Encova recommend businesses have a strong online presence.

“The importance of being easily accessible online is the top thing, especially in the food industry these days,” Carrier said. “If you don't have a good online presence and the ability to, for example, book an appointment or order a product with a couple of clicks of a button, someone’s going to leave your website very quickly.”

The Encova Center has also offered a slate of webinars to enhance businesses through the challenging times. Encova has hosted Grow with Google webinars that are a key initiative of the Small Business Assistance Program.

Carrier will continue spearheading efforts to support small businesses as part of the mission of the Encova Center to lock arms with entrepreneurs to ensure West Virginia has a robust, united and well-resourced business community.

“We (Encova) were on the phone with businesses around West Virginia from the very beginning (of the pandemic). Many businesses had to close, mine included. I was closed for seven weeks. So we needed to think outside of the box and we started doing webinars and utilizing the resources from within the Chambers College.”
- Anna Carrier

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Driven by data…and helping

When COVID-19 started depleting stockpiles of medical gear in hotspots like New York and New Jersey, the West Virginia National Guard took notice – and reached out to experts at Chambers College to prevent that from happening in the Mountain State. What role would business and economics play in personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages, you ask? It’s all in the data.

Data Driven WV, a Chambers College partnership with WesBanco that supports the state by providing data-driven technical insights and analytic solutions, joined forces with the National Guard to develop a model that forecasts PPE use and surge conditions at hospitals and living facilities in West Virginia. This model, updated regularly, has kept the National Guard ahead of the PPE needs for the state’s health professionals.

“This isn’t your typical research project,” said Brad Price, assistant professor of management information systems. “This is a moving target. And we’re humbled that the National Guard feels comfortable enough to use this in their decision-making.”

It started with a phone call to Price as he sat in his garage on a Saturday working on a lawnmower. It was West Virginia Army National Guard Maj. Ryan Coss, also an adjunct professor at the Chambers College.

“When our task force was asked to lead efforts in developing plans for a PPE demand surge, the first person I thought to call was Brad,” Coss said. “Having worked with Brad in the past I knew first and foremost that he had a passion for helping West Virginians. Secondly, I knew that Brad and the Data Driven WV team were equipped with the skills, knowledge and experiences that were required to provide an innovative solution that would bring immediate value to the entire state.”

Price quickly pulled in Katherine Kopp and Dariane Drake , his colleagues with Data Driven WV.

Through the West Virginia Healthcare Association, the team is able to pull in survey data that includes current PPE numbers, projections on how long they’ll last, number of COVID-19 patients on site and other factors from the state’s medical facilities.

“Having the capability to forecast PPE demand at a state, regional, county and facility level provides the West Virginia National Guard with a distinct operational advantage,” Coss said. “The project has given us full visibility of our PPE inventory posture across the state which allows us to develop short, mid, and long-term plans to meet current and future missions.”

The National Guard presented the team with its Civilian Service Achievement medal. The team’s work met the medal’s criteria of “rendering professional or public relations service that resulted in considerable favorable publicity in the local area” and “demonstrating courage or competence in an emergency while performing assigned duties resulting in benefit to the Government or its personnel.”

For the Data Driven WV team, this project has no end in sight, as long as COVID-19 sticks around.

Price believes the project is unique because most models that try to understand hospitalizations are geared for urban areas.

“They’re built for cities where you have two hospitals directly on top of each other and competing,” he said. “They weren’t built for rural areas. Our data looks at different populations underneath it. There were times when it was like trying to hit a BB shot off a bullet train with a baseball bat.”

Price, a Boone County native, said the collaborative nature of the project represents the Mountaineer mentality.

“This wouldn’t have happened without the contributions from Dariane and Katherine at Data Driven WV,” Price said. “I think we’re being proactive and have very good foresight to make sure our frontline workers are taken care of. And we’re the land-grant university. This is what we’re supposed to do. It’s West Virginians helping West Virginians.”

Pictured left to right: Katherine Kopp, Dariane Drake

- Brad Price