SPSP member Dante Dionne has worked in corporate America for 25 years, helping businesses grow by introducing new technologies and creating innovative solutions to provide new features, products, and capabilities to both organizations and consumers. 

SPSP: Could you tell us a little bit about what you’re currently doing professionally – how you’re working in an applied setting and any research you’re doing that ties into that?

Dante: I’ve spent the last 25 years in corporate America. I’ve been most focused on the growth side of the business by introducing technologies and creating innovative solutions to help provide new features, products, and capabilities to consumers and to businesses globally -- in different countries and languages.

My career path has required me to understand technology, business, personnel, and leadership. It was a natural progression for me in my academic studies to explore and understand consumer psychology, personalities, and social psychology in particular (i.e. “Why do people prefer different things and how can we improve and help them to get those things?”). That’s been a big focus of my academic research.

In my role here at Korean Air, we’re part of a larger conglomerate in Korea that has academic universities, hospitals, hotels, shipping, trucking, air cargo, the passenger airline business, and also many other smaller subsidiary businesses that I have the chance to get involved with. Not all of them have customer-facing opportunities for me to work to explore and collect data, but the passenger airline really does.

That’s kind of the sexy research opportunity, and what I think most people are excited to hear about. I’ve had the chance in the past couple years to present research I’ve done in the US, Vietnam, Tokyo, and Korea. A lot of people are excited about it, because they don’t get to explore this.

I just completed a Ph.D. in organizational leadership. My doctoral research chiefly focused on leadership development within a specific cultural learning community – namely, the effects of developing a top leader’s capacity for influencing optimal performance outcomes during athletic competition. This explanatory mixed methods study included participants across the global Kendo community. I just defended in February. That was huge milestone for me. Now all that is done, I feel like I can just lay down and take a nap for the rest of the year.

The cool thing about being able to do research in industry is that it’s live; it’s not secondary data. Universities have great opportunities to collect data and gain insights. I have a penchant for really understanding people “in the wild” and why they are doing these things. It’s extremely fulfilling, and I feel extremely honored and accomplished to be able to do my work.

SPSP: What do you enjoy most about employing these principles in a non-academic setting? You mentioned that it’s people “in the wild”… Is there anything else that you find especially fulfilling?

Dante: There are two parts to that answer. Part one is that, in general, there’s a great opportunity to better understand our human nature and how we’re evolving in modern societies. The second part is that national boundaries are disappearing because of globalization, and we’re seeing much more diversity and heterogeneity in the way modern tribes move and migrate through society.

Some of the research I’ve gotten to do was within a multicultural environment. For instance, while my company is Korean, they send personnel to several different regions through a job share program. For example, personnel could work in Los Angeles for a couple of years, then relocate to Germany, then to Tokyo, then back to Korea; potentially covering several nations within the span of a single career. My coworkers and the personnel I work with to collect data are largely expatriates, who are front-line influencers with global passengers coming from and going to parts all over the world.

SPSP: What do you find challenging about working in a non-academic setting?

Dante: You can’t control the environment. I have colleagues who work in an academic setting, and they have access to 1200 students that they can survey within a couple of days. In a non-academic setting, you’ve got to be very prepared. You have to look at all the different environmental variables that are going to affect your data collection and may skew your data results. You have to be proactive in looking at all the different possibilities.

There are also other structural barriers. Government regulations add constraints to when and where you may be able to do your research. Because I work for a non-Western company, there are a lot of socio-cultural constraints around when, where, and how you can do things. International data collection adds another degree of complexity. Adding multi-national environmental constraints to a research project can certainly make data collection, and fieldwork, much more exhilarating. .

SPSP: When you’re collecting data, what kind of data are you collecting, and what does that look like?

Dante: That leads into some of the advantages of working and doing data collection in a non-academic setting. I can pilot test my instrument – let’s say I’ve created a survey. I can send it out to a few people to test it, and then to a small team to pull that data, and refine it before I push it out to a larger community.

I have a fixed progression for creating the instruments and collecting the data. The data typically has to do with social interactions and the constraints or the purposes of why people interact the way they do. I did research on replacing two-way radios that almost all airports and airlines use. The infrastructure has been in place for almost 50 years, so it’s the known value.

I worked with several external hardware and software vendors to pull together equipment that I could hand out to personnel to research the effectiveness of replacing two-way radios with smartphones. I ran into the environmental factors of noise and loudspeakers. If the personnel is in baggage with trucks going by, or loading baggage into the plane with jet engines, that causes constraints for these individuals to communicate and coordinate.

Collecting data in this environment is challenging due to these environmental factors that may always be changing. There may be a plane at the gate that doesn’t have its jet engines on. That person can communicate using the smartphone and I can collect and analyze the interactivity data. But when the jet engine’s on, it’s going to cause some impediment, right? That’s an example of some data I collect.

There are also interviews, observations, my notes on my observations, and so forth. Data can be collected in numerous ways, and then I can go get secondary data, like sales data or customer call center data. Accessing all of this data is like a birthday party and you’ve got 15 presents – where do you start? So that causes challenges - knowing where to start, what to put first, what to put last, and so forth.

SPSP: You mentioned a couple of types of projects: replacing the two-way radios and surveying social interactions. Can you talk about some other projects you’re working on, in addition to those?

Dante: I just created a prototype for 360 virtual reality technology. There are always new technologies to learn, so there’s always a learning curve – what tool should I use, this one doesn’t work for this, this one works for that, this isn’t sufficient for our needs, and so on and so forth.

I think with that learning curve is also a refinement of determining how to design your studies. One of the efforts that I’ve been involved in has been first designing the prototypes, then testing them with different individuals to see their responses and what their perspectives are on how to apply these technologies where there might provide value or benefit.

We’re looking for immediate benefit, whereas in academia, there may be more postulating; “Well, we know that companies could benefit from this.” The question that never really gets answered is, “Should they?” For example, virtual reality is awesome and we know that people would love it, but is it mature enough now, when is the right time to do it, and does it make sense economically? Those kinds of questions add complexities that we look at through the studies I’m doing.

There are phenomena all over the business that probably will never get addressed, but I look into some of them. I have to decide how I’m going to collect data, what I’m going to do with it, and how I am going to present it afterwards. It’s kind of a case study on how the technology is viewed and where it is perceived to be of value in the organization.

SPSP: What advice would you give to others who are considering working in a non-academic setting?

Dante: If you already have experience in a non-academic setting, you may have some ideas about how you can contribute or add value in either a public or private organization. Look for challenges in the environment, and design your experiments around ways to overcome those challenges. It may be as simple as how people come into the office or utilize equipment, but also how they communicate and share information.

There is so much opportunity for young scientists to come in, especially with new perspectives, on how we use and adopt new technologies. They’re connected more with what the new generation is looking for and the experience they’re expecting.

Going back to replacing the two-way radios with smartphones, it turns out that the ticketing agents will use the two-way radios while they’re working with customers face-to-face. Often, this walkie talkie is going off when people are able to hear it. We first looked at the smartphone technology as “How do we overcome the challenge of privacy? For example, someone saying, ‘This stupid passenger. They won’t control their kid.’”

You don’t want those to be overheard by passengers. Another concern is the personal space of the passenger within their cultural norms. It’s expected that the agents are present and focused, so the noise of the technology can be a psychological distraction.

We thought about adding earpieces. That way, there’s the privacy factor, and the customer never knows that they are listening unless they get distracted. But we’re still placing those constraints on individuals to be splitting their focus, so we’re still not overcoming that cultural requirement by the customer that says, “If I’m talking to you, I’m expecting you’re listening, otherwise that social contract is null and void, and I’m going somewhere else.”

Those are some of the things that I think it will be important for individuals coming in to non-academic settings to look at. The criticality is a little different when you’re working directly with customers where there is the potential to lose their business forever. Including the likely loss of business from those in their social circles, that they might influence to move to another provider.

SPSP: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Dante: Oftentimes as new graduates, we’re really focused on how we can add value to society in the wild. There’s a desire to do that, but just realize it’s going to take some time to overcome the challenges. If you’re used to the academic setting, you may be more inclined initially to be more comfortable there. But working in a non-academic setting is a very fulfilling and worthwhile endeavor.

SPSP: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

Dante: I’m excited to be of assistance and of service to my community. I think this is one of the best communities to which I belong.