Anatomy of the Edelman: Measuring the World’s Best Analytics Projects

Abstract

Each year, the INFORMS Edelman Award celebrates the best and most impactful implementations of operations research, management science, and analytics. As the Edelman Award approaches its 50-year mark, we provide a history and characterization of the award’s finalists and winners. We provide some basic descriptive analytics about the participating organizations and authors, the impact of their work, and the methods they employed. We also conduct predictive analytics on finalist submissions, gauging contributors to success in establishing winning entries. We find that predicting Edelman winners a priori is extremely difficult; however, given a set of finalists, predictive models based on monetary impact could have predicted the winner over half the time in recent years, but would have had less predictive success in the early years of the competition. We suggest that, by characterizing the finalists, we can give future entrants a better picture of what it takes to compete for the Edelman Award.

Editorial: Interfaces/INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics Hall of Fame Contributors

“…From this database, Freeman et al (2020) allowed unique and unprecedented analysis into the patterns of articles in the journal over its 50-year history by analyzing methodological subject area and industry of application by journal article. Gorman et al (2020) provide similar analysis of Edelman finalists for the lifetime of that competition, albeit based on a different database. Gorman (2020) provides the first comprehensive 50-year Rothkopf rankings for both academic and nonacademic institutions and by geographic source in INT/IJAA history.…”

INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics Editor’s Statement: The Critical Role of Applied Research in Analytics

“…Certainly, the level of sophistication and size of application impact have grown over time. Gorman et al (2020) provide analyses of the evolution of the sophistication and size of the impact of Edelman Award finalist work. As noted above, the acceptance rate at IJAA has fallen recently.…”

“…"Anatomy of the Edelman: Measuring the World's Best Analytics Projects" (Gorman et al 2020) The Edelman Award is the world's leading award for applied analytics. This paper describes the attributes of participants and attempts to develop predictive models to evaluate the key factors for winning the award (https:// doi.org/10.1287/inte.2020.1052).…”

IJAA: Past, Present, and Future

“…This paper complements the two other papers in this special issue. First, Gorman et al (2020) characterize the Edelman finalists. Because the finalist papers appear in INT/IJAA, there is an organic linkage between the influential companies/organizations listed in this paper and the impactful Edelman finalists.…”