By Professor Alan W Brown 2016 was a turbulent, confusing year. Instability, unpredictability, and disruption were the bywords, pushing individuals and businesses towards an exhausting end to an eventful year. For many it seemed like the very cornerstones of business and society have been turned upside down in a post-truth world where the concept […]
Stress in the workplace is a big deal. It’s been noted that work related stress symptoms and diseases can account for more £29 billion a year spent on sick days in the UK alone, while the average amount of employees stressed at work is reaching 70% in leading UK sectors. Companies are being faced with […]
In recent years, concerns over social injustice and environmental degradation have come only second to economic recession as amongst the ills besetting society. In 1994, assigning equivalence to each of these foci – People, Planet, Profit – John Elkington coined the term the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ to promote a greater organisational awareness of and responsibility […]
There’s a reason we call the modern era of sweeping change and uncertainty the Digital Economy – not Digital Technology. Lots of organisations are realising that they must now ‘re-tread’ their whole business – not just their technology. Mind-set, decision-making, organisational structure, technology, core competency in their workforce – IT change without business change equals […]
CoDE was delighted to welcome back Simon Hill of innovation management platform Wazoku, as part of a Masters module on “Innovation Management”. The theme was The Challenges of Leading Innovation in a Digital Economy. Co-delivering with Alan Brown, Simon discussed some of his key entrepreneurial lessons, his experiences as an early founder of Huddle, and […]
We ran a full-day, intensive lab for a high-level, cross-sector group of CIOs from aerospace, insurance, media, banking and pharmaceuticals to name just a few. Together with Founders Group, we gathered some like-minded CIOs to work collaboratively on the core issue of bringing IT and Digital into the mainstream strategy for business in a digital […]
Dr Ben Shenoy, Director of the Business insights Lab in the Surrey Business School, delivered the closing remarks just recently at the 2016 SETsquared Open Innovation Showcase, held at Surrey’s School of Veterinary Medicine. SETsquared, established 14 years ago, has just been ranked the world’s number one university business incubator. The enterprise partnership consists of […]
The nature, scope, and impact of innovation is changing. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, says that the dominance of large companies over small companies is over and in today’s business world “it is fast fish which eats the slow fish”. But what is an effective innovation strategy for the digital economy? And […]
At CoDE, we believe that vacation is for those who can afford to stand still. While everyone else goes on holiday, we’ll be in the Business insights Lab as usual, plotting and scheming and generally solving the world’s digital problems before the world knows it has them. Make your summer count too: unlock the Digital […]
CoDE was in day-long discussions recently with a well-known music company, using the Lab space to address the challenging issue of how to harness digital media to best exploit the company’s vast and iconic music catalogue. We were joined by a young music professional and one of the University’s Senior Lecturers in Music, to add […]
Surrey Business School (SBS) hosted a riveting lunchtime talk by CoDE Team member Dr David Plans, CEO of BioBeats, and Synoptic Technologies CEO Stephen Mooney, on the European Network of Design for Resilient Entrepreneurship (ENDuRE). Both BioBeats and Synoptic are innovative, disruptive start-ups with valuable insight about why and how companies like them are benefiting […]
August can be a quiet time for the University, with term in abeyance and our academics in the four corners of the globe at conferences. Here on the Surrey campus, the CoDE team is helping Surrey Business School design and establish the Business Insights Lab – taking the concept of business experimentation with the application […]
With huge global disruption and uncertainty from a technological, social, financial, ethical, and legal perspective, what’s the future of business in a digital economy? And what does this mean to an entrepreneur, a business person, a marketing professional, or an engineer? The answer, of course, is that we don’t really know: we’re only at the […]
Surrey’s very own Ben Shenoy, Gerry Foster, and Stephen Temple were among those presenting their take on 5G, and the future of mobile technology in the digital economy, on 18th May at the Digital Catapult Centre in London. The workshop’s aim was to capture the Top Ten requirements for 5G networks of the future, where […]
By Alan Brown and Kris Henley. We are seeing the rise of the ‘intrapreneur’, as more and more large corporates grasp the necessity for innovation from within. In our digital economy, fostering and nourishing the intrapreneur ideally should run parallel with growing relationships between large enterprises and wholly separate SMEs, who team up to […]
What are the characteristics of a start-up that the CIO can adopt, to challenge and reconfigure their business thinking, and ultimately act as a channel of new ideas and innovative working into the large digital enterprise? This is a key issue for us at Surrey CoDE, as we explore and refine our understanding of agile […]
