Update

I’m  pleased to say that I have had some good people applying for this opportunity – sorry to say the deadline is now passed, and I’m working on the selection.  Of course, I’m always interested in new colleagues who want to work with me in this space so feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss anything further.  Thanks to all those who applied and colleagues who circulated the link.

Work with me at the University of Southampton’s School of Management

Project Title: Digital disruption and value creation

The research focuses on how small businesses in the knowledge-intensive services sector can realise value from mobile communications.  It embraces innovation theory and business strategy and will enhance competitiveness in UK plc.

Supervisor: Dr Lorraine Warren

Start Date: October 2010

Details of the Project:

The rapid development of digital technologies now presents a nexus of possibilities: widespread access to broadband/mobile technologies; smartphones enabling new forms of communication, handheld internet access and bespoke applications development; software platforms that enable a high degree of networked connectivity and communication  with the potential to amplify to (potentially) a global audience; readily available real-time geographical data; increasing availability of government datasets to the public.  This nexus produces a new locus of innovation, a shift from the corporation to the individual, recognised in new so-called paradigms for innovation, ‘open innovation’ (Chesbrough) and ‘democratic innovation’ (von Hippel) across the distributed innovation networks foreseen by Rothwell.  The barriers to digital innovation by non-computer scientists have been significantly lowered as the plethora of new businesses in the fields of social media, or smartphone applications demonstrate.  It should now easier than it has ever been to not only access and use new technologies, but to extend them, customise them, develop new combinations, and to access and develop new sectors and markets.  Thus the potential for not only incremental innovation but transformative, disruptive innovation is also possible.

However the roadmap for inductive thinking that will create value in novel and unforeseen ways in new contexts and settings is not clear.  Classical technology transfer models are too linear to translate into this milieu and are also too focussed on economic value creation at the expense of the other forms of value – social, cultural, creative, artistic and technological – that are so significant in the 21st century.

At the heart of this project is a continuation, development and extension of ongoing research on the use of complexity theory to provide an understanding of value creation in disruptive contexts because of its potential to: conceptualise across multiple, interlinked levels of analysis (ie non linear); relate initial conditions to indeterminate outcomes.  To explore the above, the project will take as its starting point the use of the iphone/smartphone as a tool for small businesses in the knowledge-intensive services sector, now that people are using mobile applications  for a wide range of tasks, from purchases, service access communication and information retrieval, bypassing traditional web access.

The Student

The project would suit a School of Management student with an MSc in a relevant qualitative discipline, or a mature student with industry experience.  In terms of future employability, the student would graduate with detailed knowledge and practical understandings that would support entry into the industry, or the development of their own business, trading consultancy skills either to companies or government agencies.

To apply for one of the above scholarships, please apply for a place on our PhD programme by following these instructions at: http://www.management.soton.ac.uk/StudyOpportunities/PhD Please email Phdteam@soton.ac.uk once you have applied stating your application number and which scholarship you are interested in.

All completed applications, which include all supporting documents and details of any funding already awarded, received by 31st July 2010 will be considered for the scholarships.  Students who already have significant sponsorship will not be awarded scholarships under this scheme.

I often write about entrepreneurial identity in  my academic work, challenging the idea of the ‘entrepreneur hero’ stereotype.  I was amused to read on the back cover of Alexandra Kollontais’s Love of Worker Bees (Virago Modern Classics, 1999), that  “Offering a graphic and rare portrayal of Russian life in the 1920s it unfolds against a backdrop of the ‘ordinary’ Russian people of the time – the party workers, entrepreneurs, prostitutes, manipulators and idealists.’  An interesting mix!

Just a very short post to make people aware, if they’re not already, about a great new magazine I came across at the EPSRC’s ExICTe workshop in Birmingham on Wednesday.   Computer Science for Fun, or cs4fn, was created and is written and edited by Paul Curzon, Peter McOwan and Jonathan Black of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science of Queen Mary, University of London. Google, Microsoft and ARM are supporters from industry.  It’s a collection of fun stuff about computer science, teaching resources and advice.  The idea is to get sophisticated ideas over in schools by methods that capture the attention – such as magic tricks – while making a conceptual point as well – and encourage people to take up Computer Science as a career or at university.   There’s a high-quality magazine as well as a website, with entertaining articles such as Torchwood: In need of Backup Actually, grown-up kids would enjoy this too!

Outcome of the request below: well, we didn’t get a direct offer from the Twitterverse, but we did spot a likely possibiity while we were looking!  And it seems like there may be another possibility on the horizon too!  So things are looking good for the chapter — and thanks for all your help folks :>)

I’m asking the social media community for help in this post! In brief, some colleagues and I have written up a piece of research into the risks, ethics and other issues raised by using social media in the classroom. Through circumstances beyond our control, it looks like the book that we were intending to publish in may not be coming out after all. It’s an academic piece, but very readable, around 7K words, completed not in draft. And we are looking for a good home for it either in another book, or perhaps a journal in the learning and teaching area, maybe a special issue: an important factor is that we want a fast time to publication. Why are we making this request instead of just casting around our selves and resubmitting to another venue? Because we want people to see the piece now, while it’s current and while we want to engage with others interested in similar topics. One of the reasons I started to engage with social media far more widely in the first place is that it helps me make my work work for me NOW! And if this works, it would certainly demonstrate the power of the social media community!

How does social media make a difference? Journal publication timescales mean that after submission, the very best you can hope for is six months to print, and that’s unusual — more often than not, the process of review and revise can take over a year, and perhaps much longer. Most papers require more than one revision and probably two trips to the reviewers overall. So by the time your work comes out, if you are in fast-moving fields, you are almost certainly out-of-date before anyone has even read the final version. Of course conferences help, but they are expensive and audiences can be limited. So, even when publication in journals is going well, timelines are long, and using social media in the meantime can help increase the impact of research, with short blogposts and twitter shortcutting the communication pathways to those who both influence and might be influenced by your thinking.

Of course, the pathway to journal publication does not always run smoothly. Your work might be rejected, even at quite a late stage and you might have to start the process all over again with another journal. Or, and this is particularly annoying, a vehicle that you are targetting may fall through. This has happened to me twice this year. Firstly, a special issue of a journal did not come to fruition as not enough sound papers were generated to justify the specific focus. Fortunately, I and my co-authors were bailed out by an understanding Editor who aided us in quickly shaping the article for the ‘main’ journal, because he recognised that we had lost a year through no fault of our own. In this new case, it seems that the intended publishers have had second thoughts as their circumstances become more constrained. Well, that’s pretty unfortunate for our chapter – but really, we just don’t want to lose the energy that we’ve built up in our team! We’re of course happy for the piece to go through any peer review processes – we just don’t want to wait for ever! If you can help, please get in touch and I’ll send you the copy!

To me, it’s really obvious that an academic needs to build a sound online academic presence – in fact, that’s why I’ve spent most of the summer building this blog, with the help of @Jas.  In fast-changing times, academics are in a global marketplace and you need to be able to make your work count for you as quickly as possible.  Of course it’s imoortant to publish in a range of outlets on and offline, but the timescales to publication offline can be so long that by the time the work comes out, it’s long past it’s sell-by date.  I’ve been having some good conversations with @lisaharris about this recently.  From a practical standpoint, we’re both up and running (see www.lisaharrismarketing.com) and are also  ready to take the show on the road, as I did in an embryonic form at Aberdeen RGU this year (see the presentation below).  Conceptually, I bring my work about entrepreneurial identity to the fore, while Lisa brings her thinking concerning digital marketing. I’m really looking forward to getting some good work together in this space soon – more later!

neurial identity to the fore, while Lisa brings her digital marketing expertise into the frame.  More later, but I think we can start to get some good theory/practice linkages going in this space.

At BAM this year, I continued the work on emergence and complexity that I’ve been developing with Ted Fuller over the past few years.  It went down very well compared with last year, I think because the concepts are now being related to new projects in the creative industries that people can relate to.  Last year’s presentation was a bit conceptual and the philosophical side was perhaps a bit inaccessible.  Now though, the idea that entrepreneurship is agile, dynamic, fast-moving and takes place in reputational ecosystems is starting to come across – though I’m not sure everyone there agreed with me!  Here’s the presentation:

In a recent blogpost my colleague Lisa Harris presented an overview of the idea of the ‘digital native’, that is, someone who has grown up with the technology and uses it proficiently and naturally [How competent are new students with technology (really), www.lisaharrismarketing.com].  In the post, she shows that while there is some evidence for the existence of the digital native student, there is quite as much against.  She highlights that Bennett, Maton and Kevin (2008) consider that ‘it may be that there is as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations’ (p779).

Indeed in our everyday experience (we work together in  the University of Southampton’s School of Management) we find many students, both postgraduate and undergraduate, who are quite weak in technology skills and reluctant to engage with new learning styles based around, say, social media. Underneath this debate, informal conversations with undergraduate students worry me – they seem at times to reveal an over-confidence in their skills (perhaps fuelled by the digital native discourse) that may not be justified in a fast-changing world where the use of social media and mobile communications is changing what is needed.  If universities are to respond to this, and support our students in their efforts to meet the needs of the job market, we need to be clear about what is meant by digital competence.  With that in mind, reflecting on all the conversations I produced the categorisation below:

In short, passives are quite adept with using technology to acquire and re-present information and communicate with others, using mobile phones, or sites such as Facebook.  Essentially they consume the outputs of others.  And they may do this very efficiently and effectively, although their usage tends to be largely at the individual level – they join and use group, but again not very proactively.  Creators however take things a little further – they produce material, perhaps uploading videos, soundfiles, acquire collections of bookmarks and perhaps keep a (regularly updated) blog.  They are more active users of say, Facebook, perhaps using it to organise events, rather than just tag along.  They may well network actively online, but largely among existing friends.  Disruptors are the most skilled, defined by their maintenance of a strong online personal identity; they may download applications to smartphones, develop new activities as a result, and use social media to bring in contacts and resources from outside their sphere of existing influence.

Experience suggests that there may be a pyramid here, with most students falling into the passive category, and only a few  aspiring to be disruptors. I would very much like to continue my research on this topic!!  What is worrying is that those in the passive category may consider themselves to be quite skilled.  This needs to be challenged if students are going to impress employers.  Just this Tuesday, I flew back from Guernsey sitting next to a guy from one of the town’s leading accountancy firms.  As we compared our views on the performance of our Blackberry Bold phones (yeah, I know) it was clear that he was expected as part of his everyday job to be able to download, and use new applications on a smartphone – this is not tomorrow in business, this is not for technologists, this is NOW.  We owe it to our students to take this agenda forward.  I’ll finish with a quote from Lisa, as I really couldn’t have put it better myself,

“At a time when universities face criticism for declining standards and graduate unemployment is at record levels, producing individuals with the skills, time and confidence to navigate and manage the online environment is increasingly important. Such students will stand out from the crowd by gaining access to new career opportunities, finding niche or potentially global audiences for their work, or enriching the lives of others. Those who do not display such initiative risk being marginalised or left behind.”

References

Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L.(2008) The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence, British Journal of Educational Technology 39/5 775-786

Harris, L. J., Warren, L., Leah, J. H. and Ashleigh, M. J. A. (2009), Small steps across the chasm: ideas for embedding a culture of open education in the university sector, OpenEd2009, August, Vancouver