Wearing ice-skates, bell-bottomed jeans and a pink Stockholm School of Economics T-shirt, Karinda Rhode is not your average business school lecturer, but then Mr Rhode exists only in the virtual world.
Apart from the clothes and pink hair, “she looks like me otherwise – if not quite the same body”, says Robin Teigland, the real-life manifestation of this Second Life avatar. Ms Teigland is an associate professor in SSE’s Centre for Strategy and Competitiveness and caretaker of the school’s “island” on the virtual world.
Second Life, where people create their own avatars and interact with others, was all the rage at the end of the noughties. As businesses piled in, sensing the commercial benefits of exploiting a new way to interact with customers, a handful of business schools began renting “unreal estate” on the site too – albeit with purer motives.