We held the second talk of this series in the School of Management today. A great talk from Scott Shane on University Spin-Offs and Wealth Creation. This guy really knows his stuff!

Visited Barcelona this week to take part in the Creative Regions in Europe conference. Good to meet old colleagues and new friends, hear critique of Creative Cities concept, but plenty of successes too. The slides are below.

I had an excellent trip to London this week to what might seem like two quite disparate events. Firstly, a workshop/forum organised by the Maritime Innovation Leadership Council held at the Institute for Marine Engineering, Science and Technology. Secondly, to hear one of my research collaborators, Professor Sally Jane Norman give a lecture on the sense of place in theatre to Sussex alumni at the Royal Society for the Arts. This lecture was of course re;ated to her new post as Director of the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts on the Falmer campus. Connection between the two? Well the MILC initiative is clearly aimed at developing economic business benefits from (in part) better understanding of the supply chain (or wider, value networks) in the complex maritime ecosystem in the UK – sound plan for UK plc. Place and theatre? The sense of seeing things differently, making new connections — the very stuff of disruptive innovation and the re-shaping of entrepreneurial landscapes. The sense of wonder that arises from that wider sense of potential disjuncture is the very lifeblood of innovation, stimulating, thinkers, inventors, engineers and designers to create radically new pmaterials, systems, services. I saw it with great clarity. A good day.

A slightly belated note to say how much I enjoyed my time with Creative Industries colleagues at INESC in Porto – some great incubation work going on out there. Here’s my presentation – looking forward to continuing this theme in near future.

The Shooting Star, Bevois Valley, Southampton hosted Southampton’s first one-day barcamp, organised by Chris Gutteridge and Chris Philips.  I didn’t get there until lunchtime, but once I read there was free chili I was roused out of my weekend torpor!  Good buzzing atmosphere when I got there, good mix of folk from local universities, IBM and elsewhere.  I gave a Lightning Talk to kick around some ideas as to how to mobilise open data for students.  Friendly atmosphere, looking forward to next year!

Last week I attended the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference at the Connaught Rooms in London.  It was great to see old friends such as Ted Fuller, Alistair Anderson, Rob Smith, Simon Down, Zoe Dann and Harry Matlay among many others.  I have to confess I spent much of the time just talking to people rather than attending presentations.  But hey, I can read that stuff on the CD later. My presentation was on the anticipation of new business models in the post-production industry, and can be found here.

A big highlight for me was attending Muhammad Nouman’s presentation on low-tech innovation in the marble mining industry in North West Pakistan. He is my PhD student and is now getting the final stages of his PhD together.  He’s done an amazing job collecting data in such a difficult region and is such a conscientious guy.  He’s probably not looking forward to his viva in March, but I am!

I really enjoyed presenting at Ignite Liverpool on Thursday night – to me, this was a new format, presenting 20 slides in 5 minutes with an automatic slide change every 15 seconds.  It’s best described by WimpyKing.  I took the bullet and went first – hopefully getting over some of my passion about working with creative artists in the digital economy.  My presentation is below – I just used a few words and clipart to get the message over  quickly – or try to!

Thanks to Frances Bell for organising this event yesterday for ISOS, Salford University’s Information Systems, Organisations and Society Research Centre in the very well appointed Think Lab.  I really enjoyed the discussion afterwards, thanks to the group for some food for thought.  Presentation below:

Pleased to say that I’ll be working with some colleagues at Southampton on a set of four forums supported through Roberts funding over the next year, on the theme of Energising Technology Entrepreneurship.  Really, this is about pipeline development – getting some of our STEM PhDs to consider commercialising the outcomes of their research, perhaps using the excellent SetSquared incubator here at Southampton.  The forums will be based around guest speakers who have been there and done it – people who can motivate and inspire through example.  Look forward to announcing more details later.

“Their relative positions on the DZ corporate ladder were obvious to McNihil, just from the density of the swarms of E-mail buzzing around their heads, Some of the execs had only two or three of the tiny holo’d images yattering around them for attention; the bottom rungs had enough that their faces could barely be seen past them……..Harrisch had none; either the corporation was paying for max’d out filtration or he was high up enough to have gone on an elite paper-only status” (Jeter, 1998, p. 14).

Such is the nightmare vision of a post-apocalyptic future where freedom from electronic communication is only available to the corporate elite.  Already, the idea that patterns of privacy and visibility might be clearly delineated in accordance with status is taking hold (O’Hara and Shadbolt, 2010). As yet though, the picture is not so clear.  Notions of privacy are continually being defined and redefined, with each new networking platform providing new pathways and also new challenges to our understanding of who we are in this space.  There are relative periods of calm, punctuated by ‘shocks’ (such as Zuckerman’s statement people don’t want privacy)  that challenges the ephemeral social structures emerging from this new milieu.

Unlike Zuckerman, my colleague Kieron O’Hara speaks of the link between privacy and autonomy, argues that the defence of privacy is a responsibility as well as a right, suggesting that part of being  a socially responsible person, is taking care over what is disclosed.  Another colleague, Tim Greenhalgh talks of the need  for a ‘currency of disclosure’.  Until we know more about the currency of disclosure, we are still placing bets that all will be well if we venture into constructing internet selves (as we are encouraged to do, often by our employers).  Of course there will be solutions, and many colleagues from ICT, Law, Business and Economics all work in this area developing new technology, rule sets and pathways that at heart see privacy as a tangible entity that may also function as a market construct to be assigned economic value.

Yet the complexity of the web is such that it may take some time before these techniques really help us as individuals and as a society.  And legal and economic constructs alone may be too simple to capture the richness of internet life on their own.  This underlying  uncertainty is becoming more pronounced as  we enter a Web 2.0 world, moving from static websites that are narrations of the past to ‘live’  interactive bricolages, where the boundaries between the professional and the private are now blurred in a volatile space (Warren, 2010).  Tim refers to our ‘multifaceted selves’ and in doing so, draws our attention to the widely debated notion of ‘identity’.  This is useful, as this is a good place for social scientists to make a convincing contribution to the debate: we can only defend (or manage) our privacy if we understand how we write our identities into being on the internet.

Influential scholars of identity  such as Goffman, Giddens and Berger and Luckmann have been around for some time.  More recently, in the 80s/90s, authors such as Turkle, Haraway and Castells took the debate into the internet age, once we realised that no-one knew you were a dog.  And of course there have been many others since then, lookimg at the potential of the internet to further decentre and delocalise our fragile postmodern selves.  The challenge for today’s researchers is to take that thinking forward, and also create new ways of thinking about identity, how it is constructed and performed, not only in  Web 2 world, but looking  forward into a web 3 world too.  In doing so, we can make a useful contribution to the debate on privacy – because identity is the nexus between the individual and society, and where so many of the debates are played out.

References

Jeter, K. W. (1998), Noir, Orion: London

O’Hara, K. and Shadbolt, N. (2010) Viewpoint, Privacy on the Data Web, Communications of the ACM, 53/3, pp. 1-3

Warren, L. (2010), The Entrepreneurial Academic in the Digital World: Narratives and antenarratives, abstract submitted for scMOI conference April 2010.