NEMODE Community Meeting
Significant themes for NEMODE research, London School of Economics
July 2013
The 2nd NEMODE Community Meeting took place on the 1st and 2nd of July 2013 at the London School of Economics with keynote speakers from Gartner and IBM with updates from academics funded under New Economic Models initiatives.
NEMODE is a network project funded under the Research Councils UK (RCUK)’s Digital Economy (DE) research programme. The objective is to develop a community of academics and practitioners seeking to research the potential for new economic models emerging from digital technologies. The project, which began in April 2012, has funding of £1.5 million over the next three years.
The project aims to inform policy on issues pertaining to the digital economy and engage with SMEs to stimulate new ideas and the creation of new markets. NEMODE will also inform business sectors and large companies about the changes necessary to enable them to take advantage of the opportunities created by digital technologies.
In preparation for the Community Meeting, delegates were asked to give some thought to the question, “What are the 3 most significant themes that NEMODE research should address?” Before the meeting, all attending delegates were invited to take part in a remote, online study where they arranged the themes submitted by their peers into groups. This grouping information, combined with some simple ICT techniques, allowed the planned breakout sessions to be structured and community led. The process was designed to be transparent, open, democratic, remote where possible and also maximise use of delegate time
On day one delegates heard updates on the progress of projects NEMODE has funded to date and saw presentations from sister projects funded by NEMinDE.
Day two was dedicated to proposing potential research in the NEMODE area (the NEMODE research landscape) and determining associated research questions, using the themes and thematic groups developed by the community in the crowdsourcing performed beforehand.
The following pages describe both the resulting NEMODE research landscape and the process by which it was developed by the community.
The ICT methods, clustering algorithms and associated support were provided by the EPSRC funded ‘ICT Perspectives’ project. We would like to very gratefully acknowledge support from both the RCUK Digital Economy and EPSRC through grants EP/K003542/1 and EP/I038845/1.
For further information please please contact Prof Mike Chantler on m.j.chantler(at)hw.ac.uk or Prof Roger Maull on R.S.Maull(at)exeter.ac.uk.
Green Group: Big and Open Data
Research Question #1:
What is the value to the UK of open data?
• Value and benefits in terms of economic, social, political and environmental dimensions
• Issues, tensions, and challenges for the nation, organisations and citizens
Research Question #2:
What skills and capabilities do UK organisations need to create value from 'big data'?
• Value of impact on: UK organisations and their business models; creation of new and skilled jobs (e.g., data scientist); and the competitiveness of the UK economy
• Scope includes all stages of big data management, e.g., data collection, data analysis, using big data for business operations, using big data in strategic decision-making..
• Implications for training, education, and policy
Research Question #3:
What are the opportunities and ethical challenges for randomised controlled experiments (RCTs) around 'big data'?
• We predict that public and private sector organisations will make greater use of big data to run RCTs to test business and public sector offerings
• Although RCTs are a powerful way of getting evidence about what works they also raise ethical concerns: firstly, about the conduct of the RCT itself, and secondly, about how RCT data is used to guide business and policy decisions
Raconteur Name:
Richard Vidgen
Group Members:
Richard Vidgen
Hasan Bakhshi
Maureen Meadows
Nina Marshall
Carla Bonina