London Creative and Digital Fusion

date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000The London Creative and Digital Fusion programme of interactive, tailored and in-depth support was designed to support the UK capital’s creative and digital companies to collaborate, innovate and grow. London is a globally recognised hub for technology, design and creative genius. While many cities around the world can claim to be hubs for technology entrepreneurship, London’s distinctive potential lies in the successful fusion of world-leading technology with world-leading design and creativity. As innovation thrives at the edge, where better to innovate than across the boundaries of these two clusters and cultures? This booklet tells the story of Fusion’s innovation journey, its partners and its unique business support. Most importantly of all it tells stories of companies that, having worked with London Fusion, have innovated and grown. We hope that it will inspire others to follow and build on our beginnings.European Regional Development Fund 2007-13

A legacy handbook for innovation

Legacy Handbook reviewing emda's experience of innovation activity. Identifies key achievements and draws out lessons learned that may be relevant to successor bodies active in this area

Towards designing a sustainable is-enabled service delivery system

This paper aims to bring into focus the concept of service sustainability. The normative literature advocates that services by companies, government institutions and service delivery are still posing great challenges to many organizations in this digital age. In highlighting the distinctive feature of service innovation, businesses will be able to maintain competitive advantage. In examining the literature on the service concept, successful companies have the customer at the forefront of their business strategy. As a result, the authors formulate suggestions on the most effective way an organization and the people concerned, can recast strategic thinking. to anticipate and adapt to ever increasing changing service environment. The contribution of the study is an IS-enabled Service Delivery Model (SDM) that places customer and staff as an integral part of the service delivery system with managed interactions and continuous quality control. This intends to support practitioners and researchers which could provide the former useful means of conceptualizing service, and raises an important issue to the latter in revisiting service quality research

A longitudinal study of IT-enabled crowdsourcing performance in a business context

Advances in internet-mediated collaborative technologies have allowed for a wide range of “open” and “crowdsourced” approaches. IT-enabled crowdsourcing (referred to as CS in this dissertation) is defined as technology enabled phenomenon of outsourcing tasks through an open call to the masses via the internet. CS practices have played an important role in facilitating search for external sources of innovation in online communities and open platforms. Over the past decade, research and practices on the new phenomenon of CS enabled by technological advances have continued to grow, evolve and revolutionize the way work gets done (e.g. Wikipedia, Kaggle, GalaxyZoo, Uber, Amazon Mechanical Turk, GoFundMe). Although several studies have been conducted in this area, few of them focused on understanding the interaction and integration of all the main components involved in the process. The concepts, components, and performance of IT-enabled crowd-sourced activities are not clear yet. Additionally, the power of (a) crowd has been largely ignored in idea generation and business consulting activities where the crowd needs to have specialized skills and high level of creativity to solve complex business problems. To address these knowledge gaps, the first section of this study identifies the main components involved in a CS process by developing a conceptual framework based on the current literature and applications. The conceptual model presented in this study takes a holistic view of the CS projects considering all the operations and factors involved. The framework allows for full, yet parsimonious, consideration of the factors that may affect the crowd’s participation effort and performance. Developing a conceptual framework expands our understanding of this phenomenon and helps to differentiate various cases based on fundamental dimensions and characteristics. The conceptual framework suggests that in order to define the dimensions of any IT-enabled CS process, we need to answer the following questions: Who? (who initiates the process? who benefits from it? who performs the task?) Why? (why does the crowd participate in the process?) What? (what is the task?) How? (how does the crowd perform the task [platform]?). Different combinations of answers to these questions, describe different types of CS processes. In the second part of this dissertation, a longitudinal study is conducted to investigate the dynamics of the major components involved in the process and their impact on individual participant’s effort and level of performance over time. Applying a longitudinal study might be the most appropriate way of studying the CS process which, to our knowledge, has not been reported in the literature before. Data from an open-source community is used to assess the dissertation model. This platform selects and crowd-sources real-life business challenges. Thousands of people from around the world take part in the competition and try to develop solutions for these challenges. The best solutions are being rewarded by monetary prizes and post-market compensation. Analyzing over 2,500 records of data, we find that the crowd characteristics (skill level, IT efficacy, international experience), their motivation (learning and direct compensations), task clarity, and communication and collaboration platform’s characteristics (ease-of-use, usefulness, media richness) impact the crowd’s participation behavior and performance. In the case of this study, since individuals compete in groups, perception of team’s behavior also has correlations with individual effort and performance. Additionally, the longitudinal study verifies that these relationships change throughout the process. In the third part of the dissertation, a qualitative study is conducted by interviewing some of the individual members of the crowd to further explain the results of the quantitative study. The interviews provide rich insights, help expand our understanding of the process, and better define the characteristics of each component involved in the process. The interpretive study also shows that the relationships between these components and the crowd’s participation behavior and performance change over time. A modified version of the CS conceptual framework in a business context is presented at the end of this section. Overall, this dissertation provides a better understanding of a technology-enabled CS process and examines the characteristics of its main components that might influence crowd’s participation behavior and performance in a business context. The results of this study could potentially fill the knowledge gap in the literature on the crowd’s performance in an IT-enabled CS process in a business domain. Understanding the crowd’s behavior can guide initiators to design proper mechanisms to attract and maintain participation of the right crowd. It provides guidance for organizations to leverage CS for activities such as business consulting, product development, and idea generation in the best possible way. The results of this study make substantial contributions to identifying the main characteristics of a CS process as a legitimate, IT-enabled form of problem solving

Construction IT in 2030: a scenario planning approach

Summary: This paper presents a scenario planning effort carried out in order to identify the possible futures that construction industry and construction IT might face. The paper provides a review of previous research in the area and introduces the scenario planning approach. It then describes the adopted research methodology. The driving forces of change and main trends, issues and factors determined by focusing on factors related to society, technology, environment, economy and politics are discussed. Four future scenarios developed for the year 2030 are described. These scenarios start from the global view and present the images of the future world. They then focus on the construction industry and the ICT implications. Finally, the preferred scenario determined by the participants of a prospective workshop is presented

BIM and its impact upon project success outcomes from a Facilities Management perspective

The uptake of Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been increasing, but some of its promoted potential benefits have been slow to materialise. In particular, claims that BIM will revolutionise facilities management (FM) creating efficiencies in the whole-life of building operations have yet to be achieved on a wide scale, certainly in comparison to tangible progress made for the prior design and construction phases. To attempt to unravel the factors at play in the adoption of BIM during the operational phase, and in particular, understand if adoption by facilities managers (FMs) is lagging behind other disciplines, this study aims to understand if current BIM processes can ease the challenges in this area faced by facilities management project stakeholders. To do this, success from a facilities management viewpoint is considered and barriers to facilities management success are explored, with focused BIM use proposed as a solution to these barriers. Qualitative research was undertaken, using semi structured interviews to collect data from a non-probability sample of 7 project- and facilities- management practitioners. Key results from this study show that the main barrier to BIM adoption by facilities managers is software interoperability, with reports that facilities management systems are unable to easily import BIM data produced during the design and construction stages. Additionally, facilities managers were not treated as salient stakeholders by Project Managers, further negatively affecting facilities management project success outcomes. A µresistance to change was identified as another barrier, as facilities managers were sceptical of the ability of current BIMenabled systems promoted as being FM compatible to be able to replicate their existing Computer Aided Facility Management (CAFM) legacy software and its user required capabilities. The results of this study highlight that more work is needed to ensure that BIM benefits the end user, as there was no reported use of BIM data for dedicated facilities management purposes. Further investigation into the challenges of interoperability could add significant value to this developing research area.The uptake of Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been increasing, but some of its promoted potential benefits have been slow to materialise. In particular, claims that BIM will revolutionise facilities management (FM) creating efficiencies in the whole-life of building operations have yet to be achieved on a wide scale, certainly in comparison to tangible progress made for the prior design and construction phases. To attempt to unravel the factors at play in the adoption of BIM during the operational phase, and in particular, understand if adoption by facilities managers (FMs) is lagging behind other disciplines, this study aims to understand if current BIM processes can ease the challenges in this area faced by facilities management project stakeholders. To do this, success from a facilities management viewpoint is considered and barriers to facilities management success are explored, with focused BIM use proposed as a solution to these barriers. Qualitative research was undertaken, using semi structured interviews to collect data from a non-probability sample of 7 project- and facilities- management practitioners. Key results from this study show that the main barrier to BIM adoption by facilities managers is software interoperability, with reports that facilities management systems are unable to easily import BIM data produced during the design and construction stages. Additionally, facilities managers were not treated as salient stakeholders by Project Managers, further negatively affecting facilities management project success outcomes. A µresistance to change was identified as another barrier, as facilities managers were sceptical of the ability of current BIMenabled systems promoted as being FM compatible to be able to replicate their existing Computer Aided Facility Management (CAFM) legacy software and its user required capabilities. The results of this study highlight that more work is needed to ensure that BIM benefits the end user, as there was no reported use of BIM data for dedicated facilities management purposes. Further investigation into the challenges of interoperability could add significant value to this developing research area

Harnessing Technology: new modes of technology-enhanced learning: opportunities and challenges

A report commissioned by Becta to explore the potential impact on education, staff and learners of new modes of technology enhanced learning, envisaged as becoming available in subsequent years. A generative framework, developed by the researchers is described, which was used as an analytical tool to relate the possibilities of the technology described to learning and teaching activities. This report is part of the curriculum and pedagogy strand of Becta's programme of managed research in support of the development of Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning 2008-14. A system-wide strategy for technology in education and skills. Between April 2008 and March 2009, the project carried out research, in three iterative phases, into the future of learning with technology. The research has drawn from, and aims to inform, all UK education sectors

A comparison of processing techniques for producing prototype injection moulding inserts.

This project involves the investigation of processing techniques for producing low-cost moulding inserts used in the particulate injection moulding (PIM) process. Prototype moulds were made from both additive and subtractive processes as well as a combination of the two. The general motivation for this was to reduce the entry cost of users when considering PIM. PIM cavity inserts were first made by conventional machining from a polymer block using the pocket NC desktop mill. PIM cavity inserts were also made by fused filament deposition modelling using the Tiertime UP plus 3D printer. The injection moulding trials manifested in surface finish and part removal defects. The feedstock was a titanium metal blend which is brittle in comparison to commodity polymers. That in combination with the mesoscale features, small cross-sections and complex geometries were considered the main problems. For both processing methods, fixes were identified and made to test the theory. These consisted of a blended approach that saw a combination of both the additive and subtractive processes being used. The parts produced from the three processing methods are investigated and their respective merits and issues are discussed