A waist-to-ceiling whiteboard dominates Wharton School Associate Dean and CIO Gerry McCartney’s tiny basement office below Locust Walk, the broad, leafy footpath through the heart of the University of Pennsylvania’s main campus in Philadelphia. In the middle of the board, McCartney has scrawled a "hit list" of new financial market data he plans to acquire for Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), the school’s Web-based collection of 100 finance and accounting databases and statistical analysis tools. At thousands of dollars a pop, buying and maintaining that many databases (not to mention the terabytes of storage to support them) would break the IT budget of most business schools. But not at Wharton. McCartney can afford them because he isn’t buying for his school alone. More than six dozen business schools around the world, including Wharton’s top competitors, buy access to WRDS (pronounced "words") for $30,000 a year. As long as the system covers its costs, McCartney can provide what he likes to call "a data supermarket."

The reason schools such as Harvard, Stanford and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management are willing to purchase a tool emblazoned with a competitor’s logo is that WRDS makes research easier. Those 100 data sets come in many different formats; Wharton delivers them in a standard format that makes it easy for researchers to merge data from different sources and use it with popular analytic software. As a result, finance and accounting professors?who advance their career by uncovering new insights into corporate performance and the workings of financial markets?can publish papers in almost half the time and consider questions that would have been too difficult to address without easy-to-use data. Meanwhile, Wharton?already known for its expertise in finance?has made a name for itself as a premier provider of academic computing services, applying the WRDS model to the development of teaching and information dissemination tools.

Wharton is honored this year with an Enterprise Value Award because it has used WRDS to extend the value of its brand by turning its competitors into customers and making business school faculty around the world more productive. "The value they’re providing is not just to Wharton but to research in [other] universities," says Doug Barker, CEO with Barker & Scott Consulting in Washington, D.C., and one of this year’s Enterprise Value Awards judges. "[WRDS] is realizing the promise of a networked world." Says Patrick Harker, Wharton’s dean: "We know we’ve crossed this magical line when junior faculty at other institutions are saying that a condition for them taking their jobs is having access to WRDS."