DIGITLab Summer Newsletter 2024

DIGIT Lab’s DE-Nexus symposium, held during London Tech Week, highlighted the UK’s Digital Economy research. DIGIT Lab, a 5-year EPSRC-funded Next Stage Digital Economy Centre, showcased its work alongside the five other centres. The centres have influenced policy, created patents, publications, open-source tools, and supported innovation and societal impact. Attendees included industry, academia, and UKRI, with keynotes from Lord Holmes.

DIGITLab research takes a multidisciplinary approach to support the UK in adopting and innovating with digital technologies. DIGITLab’s Director, Professor Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen presented the centre’s outputs: a data-driven design framework, an open-source smartphone application for patients; frameworks for agritech and public sector services. Panel sessions with significant industry representation included Beyond the Data-driven Economy and Trust, Identity, Privacy, Security. The showcase including brainstorming future research ideas with researchers including early career researchers, working across disciplines on radical computing: data, AI, health and wellbeing and creative clusters. An event report is forthcoming.

Prof Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen, director of DIGITLab led the debate at the recent DESIGN conference, on Products are Dead, Systems Forever, chaired by Prof John Clarkson University of Cambridge, opposed by Prof Jon Cagan (Carnegie Mellon). The debate was live streamed, and attended by around 400 delegates.  It is available here, and discusses digital and circular economy, together with an industrial case from DIGITLab. To watch the debate and discover who won, view the live stream below. 

Dr Hugh Williamson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at DIGITLab is hosting an online seminar 9 July 12-1pm BST. The seminar will focus on Responsible Innovation as an approach to research and development that aims to shape these processes towards the public good through the inclusion of diverse stakeholders, the anticipation of potential outcomes for society and reflexivity about the direction and purposes of technology development. Digital transformations hold significant potential to change the working of organisations, economic sectors and knowledge production systems, with implications for both people and the environment. This talk presents a responsible innovation approach to digital transformation, illustrated by ongoing work in the animal agriculture sector in the UK. This research has explored methods for fostering inclusion and anticipation in two areas: The development of Digital Livestock Technologies as solutions to grand challenges in animal farming (such as achieving Net Zero, improving animal welfare and increasing productivity and efficiency), and the integration of supply chain data via livestock traceability systems in the sheep farming sector. The talk describes these projects and draws broader lessons from them for practicing responsible digital transformations.

DIGIT Lab has developed DIGIT-BM, a digital transformation tool to provide strategic, unbiased, research-based think tank aligning with the of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles for businesses. The DIGIT-BM is designed to be delivered through Workshops and Interviews with Large Organisation leadership teams and their respective CIOs, CDOs, CISOs, CTOs, CSOs, and other C Suite executives).

DIGIT-BM aims to help organisations understand how using their resources (human, data, networks) can change their business model while still optimising their organisation’s ESG agenda.

Also, under examination is how an organisation’s use of digital technologies can not only change relationships with their customers but also improve ESG performances, potentially leading towards business model innovations.

A set of thought-provoking digital transformations cards will be used as a tool to aid these conversations and help the organisation(s) analyse their digital transformation readiness in alliance with ESG goals.

Lead DIGITLab academics (Prof. Tim Vorley OBE and Prof. Roger Maull) will provide unbiased and clear-thinking analysis of an organisation’s challenges and present opportunities for change through digital transformation. All findings are provided to participants via easy-to read reports identifying the needs and potential path for innovation through digital transformation.

DIGITLab is fully funded (UKRI, EPSRC), and as such there is no cost other than the time provided by the participants. Further details can be found here. If you are interesting in participating, please complete this form.

Thank you,
DIGIT Lab team