Ignited – The Future Issue

Ignited

Salford Business School

The #SalfordBSchool Magazine

09.2015

1 the future issue

Our academics discuss the future of Outsourcing • Robotics • Digital ID Transportation • Manufacturing ...and much more

THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO CREATE IT Peter Drucker 1908 -2005 Consultant, educator, and author whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business corporation.

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‘The Future’ is an intentionally provocative title. The future hints simultaneously at both uncertainty as well as hope. The articles in this magazine reveal just how widely colleagues from Salford Business School have interpreted the broad brief expressed through a range of creative thoughts and informative comments about their own areas of interest and research. Too often within business schools discussions of the future are reduced to the processes and documentation associated with presenting a strategic plan. This collection not only reaches far beyond conventional management thinking but David Beech also offers a critical view on the very concept and future of strategy itself.

The theme of the future also reflects the School’s own ambitious and ongoing plans for development. After a successful year as the Times Higher Education’s “Business School of the Year” what does the future hold for the School itself? The short answer is that over the next twelve months we will grow. This is growth at a time when many business schools and universities across the UK are contemplating a contraction of their focus, services and activities. The new academic and professional services appointments already set in motion for Salford Business School over the next year will support our planned student recruitment and external engagement activities. But these activities themselves are only part of the story.

We continue to work closely with organisations locally, nationally and globally by sharing our knowledge and skills where it is needed but also in order for us to continue to learn.

Knowledge transfer is a reciprocal process and – as the articles in this magazine reveal – there are so many things happening right now at the biggest and smallest scales of business that as academics it would be remiss of us not to be participating directly.

The future is undoubtedly one that incorporates technology as the pieces by Alex Fenton, Phil Scarf and Aleksej Heinze all confirm. The future is also one that places people at its centre.

Ralph Darlington and Jonathan Owens both confirm this separately in their own articles.

Chris Procter rounds out the magazine with an assertion for the importance of experiential learning. Experiencing the world ‘live’ is an approach to learning that Salford Business School has always placed at the centre of the student experience.

Gordon Fletcher

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WHAT DOES THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL IDENTITY LOOK LIKE?

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TEN DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE

CYBER PHYSICAL MANUFACTURING THROUGH THE CLOUD

GOOGLE, FREE RIDES & DRIVERLESS CARS.

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POWER OF LIVE

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BRUNEL OR BECKS?

THE FUTURE OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP

FUTURE FIT

23 SILENCING THE STRIKERS

THE ROBOT BUSINESS

CROWD OUTSOURCING

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WHAT’S INSIDE OUR FUTURE ISSUE

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CROWD OUTSOURCING A simple idea executed with high grade tech. Is this the future of workflow management?

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orking on the EU funded UC-Crowd project has been a great opportunity to see how the concept of crowdsourcing is constantly evolving, taking on new forms and filling new business niches. One of the most striking new forms of crowdsourcing is the (very simple) idea that it is possible to get small and mundane aspects of your work done by other people and actually pay them to do this. This concept of crowdoutsourcing has increasingly been refined to a high level of digital sophistication and is currently best exemplified by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is based on a straightforward workflow – define a simple and usually repetitive task, set out the limit to what you want to pay and then get crowds to complete the task. Mechanical Turk’s strapline is “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” In other words, Mechanical Turk gets people to do simple tasks that in reality

The Future Issue

are incredibly difficult for most computers. For example, the task of identifying whether a picture is a sunrise or sunset is exactly the sort of task that Mechanical Turk is designed to complete. The added benefit of the crowd means than one or two false responses are always outweighed by the common sense (rather than wisdom) of the many. Once each member of the crowd has completed their assigned task and you are happy with the result you then pay them. As an added bonus, as this is an Amazon product, the payment process is as simple as buying from the main Amazon website.

Crowdoutsourcing does contradict another form of crowdsourcing that is described as crowdwisdom. Crowd-wisdom does not really fit with the purpose of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk since it is labour not knowledge that is being sought from individual workers. Their task could be as mundane as typing predefined queries into a search engine.

This distinction can be described as the difference between syntactic labour and semantic labour which necessarily incorporates analysis, interpretation and thinking. Crowdoutsourcing is syntactic labour while seeking crowd-wisdom is the exploitation of semantic labour.

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Article

Aleksej Heinze

Similarly, other commonly acknowledged forms of crowdsourcing lie outside the purpose of crowdoutsourcing. “Crowd creation” is not directly relevant to the form of crowdoutsourcing that Amazon Mechanical Turk is currently offering.

Although the outsourced tasks always involve the completion of a specific activity this does not usually result in the production of new goods or services.

The primary purpose of crowdoutsourcing is to outsource mundane and repetitive tasks to willing workers who are present within the crowd in order to free up others who can then focus on strategic, creative and innovative thinking.

This brings us back to the core concepts of crowdsourcing. In its purest form crowdsourcing emphasises the positive and cumulative benefits of collaboration over individual exertion. The various forms of crowdsourcing including crowdfunding and crowd-wisdom all look for a direct contribution that the crowd can make to problem-solving, innovation or innovating. Crowdoutsourcing also makes a contribution to innovation but in this case the impact of the activity is indirect.

Crowdoutsourcing – when it is used as part of an organisation’s innovation strategy – is the collaborative method that enables the maintenance of a current and temporarily sustainable status quo of existing business processes and by doing so it enables others to find the time and freedom to innovate and create for an organisation’s long-term success.

Mechanical Turk gets people to do simple tasks that it turns out are incredibly difficult for most computers.

What other applications could crowdoutsourcing be successfully applied to in the future?

#crowdoutsourcing Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

The Future Issue

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THE ROBOT BUSINESS With new technological advances and bigger budgets than ever before, is our future an autonomous one?

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Salford Business School

Article

Phil Scarf

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trategic funding for advanced robotics is a hot ticket. Governments across the globe are investing in initiatives in health (to support an ageing population) and manufacturing (to bring it back home). The European Commission has announced a huge €2.8bn investment programme. This is funding that will benefit almost every industry sector.

The Japanese government has announced that the future of Japan will depend on robots, and has called for a Robotics Olympics to run in parallel with the 2020 Olympics that are also being held in Japan.

On the 1st of July 2015, the British government announced a £400m investment for innovation in Robotics and Autonomous Systems. France (€80m), the US ($US2.2bn) and South Korea ($US316m) are all investing. These plans will encourage companies in various industries, such as logistics, to participate strategically in the robot industry.

China, still far behind the rest of the world in robotengineering development, is seen as the biggest market for robotics technology, not only as a result of manufacturing development, but also because demographic change and its one child policy will make elder-care robots a vital component of its economy in the very near future. This worldwide investment is all great news for researchers and for the encouragement of innovation in the field.

While health, manufacturing and logistics dominate government strategies, consumer robotics development is gaining pace. The interest in the variety of offerings at the most recent Consumer Electronics Shows reflects the speed of these developments. The creation of humanoid robots such as “roboy” (at the University of Zurich) captures our imagination. However, there is something of a misconception as to what advanced robots in the home and every day life will eventually look like. Not so much the metallic, humanoid figure pushing the lawn mower that is found in science fiction films of the 1990s, but more the hidden autonomous systems that are sensing, planning, learning and intervening in our everyday lives (including driverless cars, the monitoring of the elderly in the home, home environment control and autonomous shopping systems).

The Future Issue

SMART-E The team will train the next generation of researchers in Advanced Robotics and Autonomous Systems.

how business schools can attract funding at the interface of operations management and technological development, and demonstrating the breadth of influence of business analytics. The core of the advanced robot is its “brain”, sensing, controlling, adapting, and number crunching analytics is a robot’s primary “thinking” activity. In the near future, autonomous systems (aka robot-brains) will be managing factories, energy systems, transportation, communications and health care. The particular role for Operations Management at Salford Business School is to develop autonomous systems for the planning and control of engineering services in manufacturing, monitoring manufacturing machines, triggering maintenance interventions, ordering machine spares, and adapting and optimising actions. In other words, to develop the “brain of a maintenance robot”. The end result is a factory that can reason from available knowledge, utilise models that are continuously updated through on-line observation, autonomously plan actions and learn new models, actions and skills.

There is something of a misconception as to what advanced robots in the home and everyday life will eventually look like.

While consumer applications make the headlines, advanced robotics and autonomous systems is quietly pioneering efficiency improvements in manufacturing. The University of Salford and Salford Business School are driving research development through a €4m EU Marie Curie Training Network called SMART-E (Sustainable Manufacturing through Advanced Robotics Training in Europe). The SMART-E network is a team of experts in embodied intelligence (University of Zurich), soft robotics (Scuola Superior Sant’Anna), compliant robotics and dexterous end-effectors (University of Salford), smart materials (Italian Institute of Technology), safety and human-machine interaction (Technical University of Munich), autonomous systems and statistics (University of Salford), and leading manufacturers and automation R&D companies (Rolls Royce, Marel, Kuka). The team will train the next generation of researchers in Advanced Robotics and Autonomous Systems. The project is a mix of hard engineering and software systems development, the former pioneering nextgeneration compliant arms and grippers while the latter will produce computational models for knowledge processing and learning manufacturing operations.

The SMART-E project exemplifies the contribution that Operations people in business schools can make to the wave of robot development, showing

What do you expect robots will be doing in business and in the home in ten years time?

#robotbusiness Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

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G N I C N E L SI E H T S R E K I R ST The Future Issue

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Salford Business School

Are we ready to embrace a trade union bill, heralding the most significant tightening of industrial action since the Thatcher era?

Article

Ralph Darlington

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ven though strike levels in the UK have fallen dramatically to their lowest ever historical level, the threat and use of strike activity by trade unions – notably within the public sector, the location for some 80 per cent of trade union membership and where the vast bulk of strikes have taken place – clearly continues to concern politicians and business. The Queen’s speech in May 2015 confirmed the newly elected Conservative majority government’s intention to introduce within the first Parliament a Trade Union Bill that will effectively herald the most significant tightening of the rules on industrial action since the Thatcher era. The most notable change are the introduction of new voting thresholds in trade union strike ballots.

The Future Issue

The proposed legislation aims to further tighten up balloting regulations in relation to strike mandates. All unions will have to persuade a minimum of 50 per cent of their members eligible to vote to participate in any strike ballot in order for it to be considered lawful. In contrast, current balloting rules do not require any specific level of participation by union members. In the ‘essential’ services – health, education, transport and fire services – as well as the need to obtain the 50 per cent minimum turnout, at least 40 per cent of those eligible to vote must support strike action for it to be lawful. Ballots currently require a simple majority to back action to be consider lawful.

FEAR OF THE ESTABLISHMENT The threat of strikes in the public sector still concerns politicians and businesses.

Not surprisingly many business leaders have welcomed the prospect of another round of legislation on strike action with its introduction of ballot participation thresholds, concurring with the Conservatives that it would stop strike action on the basis of ballots that only involve a minority of members. The argument is that this approach increases the democratic legitimacy of any action taken by unions. As the new Conservative government’s Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, has claimed: ‘We’ve seen…in the last five years, strike action that took place where perhaps only 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the members of that profession actually voted for it, and that’s not right, it’s unfair’ (BBC News, 12 May 2015).

In some respects the pledge to introduce further restrictive regulation of strike balloting might seem ironical given that strike activity has for the last 20 years remained at

historically low levels, notwithstanding some very large set-piece one-day public sector strikes. So what is it that explains the pressure for legislative change?

It would appear the Conservatives’ perceived ‘problem’ is less one that exists now but rather what is foreseen and feared in the future. With an economic and political imperative to proceed with much deeper and more sustained spending cuts than those previously seen and to tightly control public sector pay increases, the new Conservative government’s proposed legislation appears to have been principally designed to try to make it much harder for unions to take strike action and to weaken potential future union resistance to more austerity. As Dave Ward, the new general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, has said: ‘This is a Tory government that is planning to undermine the incomes and conditions of working people whilst at the same time cynically sabotaging the very means they have to speak out in protest’ (Express and Star, 27 May 2015).

Survey findings from a study conducted at Salford Business School of 146 strike ballots conducted by 26 different unions over the period 1997-2015 show that while in the past unions have generally been overwhelmingly successful in winning majority ‘yes’ votes in favour of strike action. Under the proposed legislation many unions would fail to achieve the Tories’ proposed 50 per cent participation threshold, and for those that did they would still often fail to obtain the 40 per cent majority threshold of those eligible to vote. Although there would be significant variations across different sectors, unions and ballots, many unions will find that the legislation will make it very difficult for them to mount legal strikes as a means of challenging employers in national negotiations and in response to government-initiated austerity measures.

How will the trade unions leaders respond to a Trade Union Bill that will threaten to undermine effective trade union organisation and the right

Strike activity has for the last 20 years remained at historically low levels.

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to strike? Although Len McCluskey of Unite and Dave Prentis of Unison have said the unions might defy the new laws by holding illegal strikes to fight against job losses and pay restrictions, it remains to be seen whether such militant rhetoric is matched by action in practice. While the unions will undoubtedly campaign vigorously against the introduction of the proposed new law, they are also confronted with the dilemma that such a campaign may well be doomed to defeat given the Conservatives’ majority in parliament. In an environment in which strike action that failed to achieve the support of a legal ballot would leave the unions exposed to injunctions, damages, claims and even action for contempt of court, it seems unlikely that union leaders will defy thelaw, rather than ‘bend the knee’.

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In the process unions will feel obliged to become more consciously strategic by only balloting those groups of workers who they can be confident would attain a 50 per cent participation threshold and 40 per cent eligibility threshold. Any plan to utilise the Human Rights Act to mount a legal challenge to the new restrictions on the right to strike is unlikely to be successful. The Conservatives have already stated their intention to repeal the HRA in the not too distant future, thereby breaking the link between the UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights.

A more likely prospect is a change in union tactics with an increased reliance on so-called ‘leverage campaigns’ or ‘citizen bargaining’ – whereby unions (such as Unite in the Ineos dispute at Grangemouth in 2014) use demonstrations, protests, boycotts, and social media campaigns to open up new lines of attack on the employers and its senior management, with the aim of getting shareholders, customers, suppliers and local communities to put pressure on the employers to back union demands.

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THIS IS A TORY GOVERNMENT THAT IS PLANNING TO UNDERMINE THE INCOMES AND CONDITIONS OF WORKING PEOPLE WHILST AT THE SAME TIME CYNICALLY SABOTAGING THE VERY MEANS THEY HAVE TO SPEAK OUT IN PROTEST

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(Express and Star, 27 May 2015)

In the United States, community campaigns have been used to help win improvements in pay and conditions in different industries. The outcomes have been to force companies such as Walmart and MacDonald’s to offer pay increases after customer and public protests outside stores. Likewise, in the UK staff at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, south London, fought off redundancies and won the living wage in 2014 after the threat of a boycott by cinema-goers.

In the face of the tightening of the rules on industrial action, these type of campaigns – which operate outside the law on industrial action ballot are likely to become the ‘weapon of choice’ for the unions.

STRIKE MANDATES The proposed legislation aims to further tighten up balloting regulations in relation to strike mandates.

The Future Issue

Meanwhile, it is possible that, against the backcloth of a new wave of spending cuts affecting pensions, jobs, pay, and working conditions, some groups of workers coming into collusion with the legal liabilities of organising strike ballots will take unofficial and wildcat strike action, thereby undermining the legislation. In other words, far from ‘improving’ industrial relations as the government claims, the proposals may create a much more bitter and destabilising state of affairs.

What are the prospects for unofficial and wildcat strike action as the austerity agenda proceeds apace?

#futurestrikes Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

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Article

Gordon Fletcher

GOOGLE, FREE RIDES & DRIVERLESS CARS.

The future of transport is around the corner, but who is in the driving seat?

The Future Issue

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he recent claims that Google may soon be offering free rides for those willing to become a passenger in one of their driverless cars offers a small glimpse into the future of transport. These rumours of Google’s apparently charitable but potentially Uber-breaking taxi service were followed only days later by the announcement that Amazon would be offering a one-hour service from ordering to delivery.

While transport logistics – and especially freight – might appear to be at the most mundane end of the retail consumer experience it still remains a significant barrier – if not the most significant barrier – to enjoying the combined benefits of the sociality of the high street with the convenience of ecommerce. The thought of driverless white vans just does not have the same appeal as driverless passenger cars. The attention grabbing media headlines so far have been about the use of driverless cars to create a continuously updated Google Streetview and the near miss of two driverless cars on “real” Californian streets. Away from the headlines it is in logistics that the benefits of combining artificial intelligence and “Internet of Things” technology in the form of driverless vehicles will have the most impact. In effect, driverless vehicles can solve the “last mile problem”.

The “last mile problem” is a recognition of the very many supply chain difficulties involved in getting people and packages to their final destination.

Research shows that as many as 50% of home parcel deliveries fail at the first attempt with a similar figure being quoted for the second attempt. The rates of failure are claimed to climb even higher in specific regions including London. The problems of congested transport systems are only compounded further when over 40% of consumers regularly order multiple sizes of clothes in order to get the right fit while also taking advantage of retailers’ free returns policies. But the problem of failed deliveries and variable clothing sizes are only one half of the last mile problem. The inability to get consumers into the high street brought about by combinations of high parking fees, restricted spaces and poor disconnected public transport infrastructure represents the other half of the “last mile” problem and has been a major influencing factor on the perceived decline in the quality of UK high streets.

A free ride from Google could provide the solution to both parts of this complex, expensive and polluting problem. Using driverless vehicles to move parcels from retailers and warehouses to residential areas – when the recipients are known to be available to receive their parcel – could be complemented on the vehicle’s return journey by the movement of people from residential locations towards the high street for socialising as well as some “discovery” shopping.

This dual and hybrid use of vehicles for carrying both freight and passenger seems unfamiliar in an era where all of our public transport functions have become neatly and functionally disentangled. Trucks carry freights, buses carry people and different types

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of trains serve different functions. To find an earlier form of public transport that integrated multiple functions requires a step back beyond the motor vehicle to the era of the stagecoach when regular services between towns took people and parcels for varying fees but without discrimination.

The re-combining of people and parcels into a driverless vehicle also solves a new challenge that is the direct result of having no driver. Currently drivers of delivery vans also perform the key function of confirming the delivery of an item to the recipient or a trusted third party. In a driverless vehicle there is no one to cover the “last yard” of the delivery (or the “first yard” of the return).

All those “free” rides being offered by Google might have a cost after all. Taking a free ride could also enrol those who take up the opportunity for travel to become Google’s unpaid delivery workers. The opportunity is also another example of crowdoutsourcing on a potentially massive scale. The passenger helps to make deliveries and collect returns. The driverless car silently calculates optimum routes to weave between the collection and delivery of people and parcels constantly managing a chain of trust through apps, facial recognition and ‘mutual signing’ of deliveries.

It is in logistics that the benefits of combining artificial intelligence and “Internet Is this the future of transport of Things” technology in the form of and parcel deliveries? driverless vehicles will have the most impact. #futuretransport Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

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TOMORROW’S FORECAST CYBER-PHYSICAL MANUFACTURING THROUGH THE CLOUD

Does the future of manufacturing lie in the “theory of multi-sequence” where a consumer can initiate the manufacturing process through cloud connectivity from their own sofa?

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Article

Christos Papanagnou

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ow would you feel if with a simple finger tap while sitting on your own sofa a whole production process could be triggered? And how would you feel if this tap was just the beginning of a whole series of processes that would bring your favourite box of sugar-free assorted biscuits to your home? At the same time, the biscuit manufacturer would have no excessive stock or inventory shortages to control. This scenario is what happens when mass customisation meets the “Internet of Things” and when cyberphysical manufacturing systems meet big data predictive analytics.

The biscuit factory of the future (as well as other manufacturers) is based on new manufacturing and supply chain management philosophy. What can be described as the “theory of multi-sequence”.

Although it sounds futuristic, a time when enabling technologies - that bring the virtual and physical worlds together – will create a truly networked world where a consumer’s finger will initiate the manufacturing process is not too far away.

There has already been a lot of debate about and use of, cyber-physical systems. These systems represent the next generation of manufacturing and they have increasingly come to replace the embedded systems that currently are used to deliver manufacturing processes. For example, the bottle of fresh milk you find on supermarket shelves with varying package sizes and different fat content is the result of fully automated systems with embedded technology.

However, embedded systems such as these are isolated from the rest of the world. By connecting data and services through the “Internet of Things” will allow embedded systems to form more complex and responsive cyber-physical systems.

The challenge for manufacturing companies in the future is how they will build innovative data products and services. The systems of the future will need to turn large data volumes into meaningful data assets that can interact with a range of different types of devices and lead to quantifiable gains in competitive advantage in the marketplace. In almost all high volume manufacturing plants the vast majority of data suffer from neglect or even

The Future Issue

misuse. However, manufacturing companies will only survive by recognizing the valuable data that is obtained from their most treasured asset, their own customers.

The solution lies in transforming into the factories of the future by engaging in Industrial Revolution 4.0.

This manufacturing “rebellion” marries production and network connectivity into an “Internet of Things” complete with big data analytics that makes the new industrial revolution a reality.

This new type of intelligent production follows three trends. The first is connectivity, which is essential to the development of the future workplace.

Manufacturing processes will seamlessly and bidirectionally interact with real-world objects and environments on a global scale and across a variety of application domains and stakeholders. The result is the “Internet of Things”. Machines will speak to each other through cloud connectivity and will integrate in order to manage the demands of variable consumer demand and different physical capacity. At the same time, workers’ direct interaction with physical systems will enable processes that are real world aware, event based, and significantly more adaptive than today’s current processes.

The result is increased visibility, responsiveness, and safety in the workplace of the future.

A truly networked world where a consumer’s finger will initiate the manufacturing process.

Mobility will play a fundamental role in the workplace of the future by providing both operators and supervisors with critical real-time data at their fingertips. Mobility goes beyond the need of pure connectivity to support manufacturing business needs including the need to data and receive contextual and intelligent analytics. Manufacturing firms will develop a next generation of mobility assisted applications such as manufacturing and logistics tracking and tracing tools, product genealogy, and cross channel product distribution.

Lastly, intelligence is required to assimilate and make meaning from the huge amounts of data originating as a result of increased collaboration.

As a result when you place your order of sugar-free biscuits from your new self-driving car with its enhanced connectivity it will render meaningful information on the fly on mobile devices for managers and supervisors on the factory floor.

The development of intelligent tools capable of performing time data analysis and forecasting even for the most complex event processing will become essential for any manufacturer.

Which manufacturers will be the first to become ‘smart’ manufacturers?

#futuremanufacture Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

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DON’T WOR WHAT ANYB IS GOING TO THE BEST W PREDICT TH IS TO INVEN

RRY ABOUT BODY ELSE TO DO...

WAY TO HE FUTURE NT IT ALAN KAY ATARI AND XEROX PARC

TEN DiSRuPTiVe TeCHNOLGieS FoR tHe FUTuRE Small scale power generation and storage While the Polywell fusion reactor is an extreme view of personal electricity generation there are a wide range of wind, solar and hydro projects that focus on generating power on a personal or household level. The recently announced Tesla Powerwall also tackles the problem of storing this newly captured energy “off the grid”. The increased power consumption brought about by the wide use of digital devices is only one reason why personal power generation is an important technology. www.esearch.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=238715 www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/powerwall

The Future Issue

Personal molecular sensors

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These handheld sensors can provide a summary of the chemical composition of an object. The object in question could be any item including food or clothing. This sensor has the potential to disrupt a number of industries as well as bringing greater self-awareness for dieters and the health conscious. www.consumerphysics.com/myscio

Personal DNA machines

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DNA is already a big business for family history research and is increasingly used in criminal cases.

As an individual fingerprint a person’s DNA is a unique marker. Personal DNA machines open up a range of opportunities as well as creating a range of ethical issues and potentially worse. www.openpcr.org

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Kit based 4 building construction Systems for quickly constructing habitable buildings is important in times of disaster and crisis.

Increasingly the housing shortage in the UK and elsewhere is forcing a need to reconsider traditional building techniques more thoroughly. Most systems are inspired by Lego or Fuller’s Geodesic Dome. www.domekit.cc

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Industrial standard FinTech

Integrated and seamless cross-platform personal marketing

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There is a quiet revolution going on in finance. The application of technology including social media and communications technologies into the financial arena is slowly threatening the position of banks as the gatekeeper in personal financial management. Peer to Peer loans were only the start of the FinTech revolution.

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Despite the early championing of social media by marketing agencies there is still a long way to go to the achievement of the current goal of digital marketing – true cross-platform marketing. The aim is not to cover every possible social media channel with the same campaigns but rather to break away from the constraints of a single device in order to target a campaign to an individual across all of their own personal devices.

www.theguardian.com/small-businessnetwork/2015/apr/24/fintech-traditional-bankingtech-investors/

High streets become tech-free mini-breaks

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As high streets in the UK risk becoming irrelevant against the rise of high-speed ecommerce there is an opportunity for these places to employ an old technology – in the form of the Faraday Cage – and make high streets a museum of the “old days” before Wi-Fi, RFID and Bluetooth. The Faraday Cage makes any form of radio communications impossible and would turn the high street into a place for mini-breaks away from email, phone calls and texts.

Tactile remote telepresence

www.computerworld.com/article/2547046/dataprivacy/faraday-cages.html

www.tinypaperclips.com

Connected & interactive everything 9 The “Internet of Things” simply put means that everything is online – always. The things in this network receive data (about the who is nearby, other things that are close and the current conditions) and send out data. The potentially infinite combination of things equally creates near infinite opportunities. www.ninjablocks.com www.variableinc.com

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If everything is digital and virtual there is no space for touch and contact. Tactile telepresence brings touch back into the spaces created by social media and teleworking to enable another form of human contact.

Distributed Autonomous Corporations (DACs) Using artificial intelligence, network technology and advanced algorithms companies would run autonomously based on a set of pre-defined business rules and would react to unexpected change based on responses that the system would learn and improve over time.

The shareholders – the only humans in the corporations – would have no involvement in the day-to-day operations.

These are the corporations made for the “Internet of Things”.

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www.aeon.co/magazine/technology/are-we-ready-for-companiesthat-run-themselves

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FUTURE FIT

A NEW AGE OF HEALTH AND FITNESS FOR WELL-BEING AND ENGAGEMENT

Combining your fitness data with other more conventional ‘social’ data opens up a myriad of possibilities.

The Future Issue

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igital fitness is a growing phenomenon and it is a connected fact that the market for apps is expected to grow from $US 2.4 billion in 2013 to $US 26 billion by 2017. These numbers are just the start. All the major manufacturers of hardware and software including Intel and Apple as well as major social media platforms like Facebook are furiously working to gain market leverage in the field of digital fitness or ‘mHealth’.

But why is this business so lucrative and what does the future hold? With the massive explosion of smartphones and apps, people are not only more connected but are also more conscious about their own health and well-being. Newsfeeds, activity trackers and even Youtube channels all promote the message of a healthy lifestyle. Couple this exposure to information with the volume of people, often competitive people, who are online within local and global social networks and there is the added incentive of comparing and sharing our fitness and health-based activities with others.

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Article

Alex Fenton The future of digital fitness lies beyond the screen as we now begin to connect ourselves to devices such as fitness wristbands and other “no interface” items that contribute to the creation of the “Internet of Things”. In the future however, we may not need or indeed want a wristband, armband or any other type of cumbersome add-on. The sports watch market is evolving rapidly and it is evolving away from the current form of the watch. It may be that your t-shirt, trainers or yourself contains the smart, Internet connected sensors that will eventually come to surpass the capabilities of current smartphones and wristbands that we now use.

already tracking your fitness data and this may be valuable to you, but it is even more valuable to others. For example, social networks and search engines will be able to tell so much more about you from your fitness data than simply who your friends are, what you search for and the data you share. Combining your fitness data with other more conventional ‘social’ data opens up a myriad of possibilities for you and for the companies that provide the social networks and search engines that you use and from them ultimately the advertisers who can precisely target you in a way that could appear to pre-suppose your future actions.

Instead of wearing a wristband or using a phone to simply measure how far or fast you ran, how long you slept or your heart rate during these activities, smart sensors and the next generation of apps will become your personal coach. With smarter algorithms, better sensors and more artificially intelligent software – your app will get to know you and then give you sound advice for future activities.

The data captured from you and your surroundings will enable better insights than any personal trainer and the psychology of the interaction will motivate you while continuing to adapt to your own preferences. Your digital personal trainer will know when you need to work harder or not. The digital trainer will take into account the very many variables it is continuously receiving from your muscles, heart and sleep patterns and matching them up with your current location and the time.

In the future, people will worry less about sharing this real-time data and comparing fitness data will be regarded as acceptable as sharing your social media updates. Maybe nobody cares that you ran 10k today, but the mass capture and sharing of this data in addition to other social interactions will lead to new possibilities and better connections.

Perhaps we will eventually reach a plateau in the number of people that would really want this level of personal detail about themselves. Smartphones are

The Future Issue

outweigh the benefits of secrecy. When social media engagement became the expected norm for sports teams it was also a disruptive step forward. We will eventually look back to this current situation and be surprised that 37 million people following social media health updates of a single footballer was anything but the norm.

The future of digital fitness is about moving away from the screen and the reporting of individual activity. It is about using the data for better stories, personalisation and for engagement. It is also about becoming healthier, identifying potential problems or risks before they occur and in becoming more comfortable with the sharing of that health data when it makes sense to do so. I am personally looking forward to it.

This constant monitoring of data will also be true of top sporting teams and celebrities. The top teams are already using player fitness data privately to gain a competitive advantage and clubs and players are using social media to engage with fans. In the future, sports teams at all levels will benefit from the use of this data for insight and engagement.

Rather than simply following Tweets from Cristiano Ronaldo in the future, you will be able to see in real-time how he is performing on and off the pitch for a range of parameters. The world’s leading sports teams will demand open access to this data, because it will engage audiences globally and this fact will

Which sports will be the first to share their stars health data?

#futurehealth Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

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M

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THE FUTURE OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP

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Salford Business School

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David Beech Going forward, will autocratic control of power in the economy effectively crowd out democratic control of power in the polity?

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ccording to Edward Snyder, Dean of Yale School of Management, writing in 2012, business schools on the global commons are required to enable students to understand and to make a leadership contribution that is relevant to: • Increasing complexities within and across business and society.

• The way markets work and the unrelenting nature of competition.

• The way organisations function and the role of teams, networks, and individual leadership.

According to Clausewitz, writing in the early 19th century, strategy is the means to policy ends through operations and tactics. From this point of view strategy is goal directed thinking, resource deployment, coordination, and learning to produce adaptive action and outcomes in evolving conditions. There’s a lot going on here.

In particular, Clausewitz makes a clear distinction between establishing and renewing policy and crafting and adapting strategy to realise policy.

In peace and war political leaders do policy and policy is legitimate to the extent that it is accepted by the community it is directed towards. In war generals do strategy and deploy this through an operational infrastructure and tactical engagement with an enemy (competitor). However, generals, like Napoleon, may capture power and combine the institutional leadership responsibility for policy making with executive responsibility for strategy.

The Future Issue

Can legitimacy survive this combination? Indeed, more pointedly, what price do communities pay for this combination? In the economic arena this combination can provide bread and pop today.

But what of the future?

I have jumped from political democracy in communities to the economic autocracy of business.

Following the democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries institutional leadership in the political arena was progressively subjected to citizen control. However, at the same time, in the economic arena the property rights of owners gave them autocratic control over policy, strategy, operations, and tactics. In other words, owners of property have control of institutional, executive, operational, and frontline leadership. As a consequence ‘within firms tasks are doled out by fiat and strategies are set by the Politburo of the corporate board’ (see Ronald Coase obituary, The Economist, 7th Sept 2013).

The concern is that business schools typically position strategic leadership of the enterprise as being the combined responsibility for policy and strategy and strategic leadership in the enterprise as the responsibility for operations and tactics.

Levels of leadership are framed as strategic, operational, and frontline leadership. Whatever happened to community authorised institutional leadership and to enterprise legitimacy? The business revolution of the 19th century came

between the earlier democratic revolution and the educational revolution of the 20th century. In other words the democratic political revolution laid the foundations for an autocratic business revolution and both revolutions contributed to subsequent educational change. Going forward will autocratic control of power in the economy effectively crowd out democratic control of power in the polity? Is one dollar, one vote the way ahead? Perhaps attention to the political economy of leadership would better equip students to understand and make a leadership contribution to some of the ‘complexities within and across business and society’.

In the meantime, at the very least, conceptualisations of strategic leadership need to recognise the distinctions between institutional, executive, operational, and frontline leadership. Crucially a distinction between institutional leadership and executive leadership needs to be acknowledged.

Growing separation in firms of the roles of a policy chair and an executive CEO offers some degree of practical recognition of the distinction. More is required if global citizenship is to mean more than only better access for everyone to the ‘necessaries and conveniences of life’.

A distinction between institutional leadership and executive leadership needs to be acknowledged.

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THE FOUR BROAD AREAS WHICH FALL WITHIN THE SCOPE OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP ARE RESPONSIBILITIES FOR...

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP OF THE ENTERPRISE The top level management team who take responsibility for crafting, realising, and evolving strategic purpose – identity, direction, aims, and values of an enterprise and its staff and associates – in relation to competitive position and to constant variation in configurations of external and internal stakeholder interests and aims and associated value chains.

LEVELS OF LEADERSHIP Leadership is the exercise of influence and everyone can exercise influence.

INSTITUTIONAL LEADERSHIP OF THE ENTERPRISE A board level responsibility for enterprise identity and legitimacy. Achieving and sustaining legitimacy requires the board of an economic enterprise or the legislature of a political enterprise (polity) to gain ongoing support and authorisation from the wider community for enterprise purpose, actions and outcomes that are in the interests of the common good. This is the governance responsibility of institutional leadership.

The Future Issue

OPERATIONAL LEADERSHIP IN THE ENTERPRISE

More generally leadership in each of these four areas is the exercise of reciprocal influence which engages people in action for common aims and mutual benefits in evolving circumstances. Leadership is the exercise of influence in relation to a common goal. Every single person, including primary school children, has the capacity to exercise influence.

What varies and differentiates between leadership roles and practices are the scale, scope, and impact of that leadership by an individual. Attention to the common good of citizens, their communities, and their ecosystems must be central to any educational enterprise.

The senior and middle manager responsibility for crafting and evolving within and between enterprise infrastructure – structures, systems, capabilities, and cultures – through which people implement, review, and evolve identity, purpose, and coordinated action and learning for stakeholder benefits in evolving circumstances.

FRONTLINE LEADERSHIP IN THE ENTERPRISE The frontline manager, team leader, and supervisor responsibility for realising strategic purpose by engaging people in action and learning through which strategy is implemented and evolved for stakeholder benefits.

Will business schools enable their students to contribute to diminishing or to enhancing general adaptive capacity?

#futurestrategy Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

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Will the future blueprint for education make aspiring to be an engineer as attractive an option as becoming a footballer? ith all the media hype coming from Westminster perhaps the great British public could be forgiven for assuming that UK engineering is well on the road to recovery. The truth is that the British connection to engineering has never really left us. It is perhaps more accurate to recognise that the traditional face of UK engineering has changed considerably over recent years. The entire sector has become leaner, more agile, more customer focussed and most importantly has found ways to diversify in the global marketplace ... this pace and form of change on the whole has produced the framework for an industrial success story.

Why have we – the UK public – generally been so negative about this success? Put simply it is proof of the validity of the old adage that headline news always focuses on the bad news first. As a consequence the negative images of UK engineering has produced a serious impact on the sector. What the UK Government is now putting at the forefront of future engineering development – and what many in the engineering sector recognise as the real source of the problem is to address a serious and worrisome skills shortage.

The Future Issue

As ‘Think Tanks’ look at the future of the engineering sector there is a recognition that there is no realistic ‘fast track’ or ‘quick fix’ to the dilemma. However, at least for now, we are seeing something being done. The long and continuous cry from the UK professional bodies (today’s engineers) to bring back apprenticeships is now starting to pick up pace, particularly with the development of industry supported University Technical Colleges (UTCs).

Nothing new here though! Many readers from an earlier generation will remember ‘Technical Colleges’. These institutions were great servants in the development of the engineers of yesteryear.

The approach of these institutions worked and we have the living proof.

So, something is being done and you could say anything is better than nothing. However, it is no use bemoaning the low number of school leavers coming forward for apprenticeships or the poor quality of engineering undergraduates if industry and nationally very little is being done to sell engineering as an attractive option for school-leavers.

Our future and urgent attention needs to be focused on the very early stages of education. This process has started but progress is slow. Slow uptakes could mean that the UTCs will be closing before they are up and running. Research from the UK Engineering Council and Engineering Employers Federation both show the critical importance of engaging potential engineers at a young age. Beyond the UK it is possible to witness youngsters from primary school age saying they want to be an engineer when they grow up. In the UK, youthful aspirations are more likely to be expressed in terms of becoming a footballer or pop star.

The situation is not all bad news. The engineering sector itself is surviving well and with relative success. The UK is still recognised globally as one of the leading innovators and developers in new products. For example, do you use a Hoover or Dyson? “God Save the Queen” is regularly played at F1 for the manufacturer. The apparent dinosaurs of past glories have had to move with the times or die. 97% of UK engineering companies are now SMEs. This compares to twenty-five years ago when they consisted of just fewer than fifty percent of the engineering sector. Subsequently, the sector itself has learnt to diversify into new products and markets as a mechanism for competitive survival.

UK Engineering has survived some very tough times in the past and, despite negative publicity, it is still here. The UK has increasingly been branded as purely a service country, but arguably for every service company you can find an engineering company that actually makes something. The reality is that ‘Engineering’ as we knew and imagined it has changed and diversified considerably in order to survive and more importantly to succeed.

The major problem facing UK Engineering now, is how to effectively resource and address a widening skills gap in order to ensure future survival. Are we really doing enough to make becoming a engineer as attractive an option as aspiring to become a footballer or pop star? I hope not. A closing thought, albeit thanks to Jeremy Clarkson, officially our second greatest Briton is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but would an average seven year old know who he was in comparison to David Beckham?

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Salford Business School

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Aspiring Engineer

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Aspiring Engineer

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Jonathan Owens The Future Issue

So, is there a secure future for the UK Engineering sector?

#futureengineering Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

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WHAT DOES THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL IDENTITY LOOK LIKE? Article

Maria Kutar and Marie Griffiths

The Future Issue

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Salford Business School

A HIVE OF SOCIAL ACTIVITY A typical person is likely to have a range of social networking profiles and sometimes multiple ones.

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emember the now old adage, “On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog”? The statement had meaning when there appeared to be a clear line between ‘real’ life and being online. Fast forward to the start of 2015 and there were over three billion global Internet users (Internet World Stats) – that is a lot of identities and they can’t all be of the canine variety.

Our online identity can be defined as the assemblage of electronic information that differentiates us as an individual, but unlike the majority of components that form our physical identities many online identities are ephemeral in nature, leaving behind a trail of digital footprints in virtual spaces. It is at this juncture we face a quandary.

Our public identity impinges on our personal privacy. You can’t have one without impacting on the other and with digital activities part of ‘real’ life we are now in the realms where the two entities have become blurred beyond any sensible form of separation. Our reality has become ever more complex. A typical person is likely to have a range of social networking profiles and sometimes multiple ones; professional and educational profiles; digitally enabled and accessible accounts through a diverse range of service providers including banks, utility companies, government and ecommerce sites and different cloud providers. All of this is consumed through a range of screens depending on opportunity, time of the day and location.

Unlike footprints online identity is much harder to erase.

The current three billion or so Internet users could easily amount to over 30 billion aspects of online identities (a very conservative guess). Almost every one of these aspects of online identity contains some sensitive personal information, and with the growing sharing culture that comes with social networking, this makes every identity potentially vulnerable to a security threat. The most common threats – and unsurprisingly not generally well recognised by everyday consumers – are described as man in the middle (MITM), man in the browser (MITB) or now more commonly man in the mobile (MITM). This form of malware is an eavesdropping attack that allows attackers to intercept, send and receive data not meant for them. A further sophistication is Zeus-in-the-mobile (ZITMO), one of the most popular botnets responsible for hacking into thousands of online banking accounts.

Keylogging is also a common threat, which is the act of covertly capturing, and recording the keys struck on a keyboard. These types of threats have one universal goal and that is to steal aspects of a person’s identity.

So how does the individual manage the assemblage of personas and accounts that make up their online identity? On the one hand there is encouragement from the social networking sites to not only use their social network services, but also to take up the offer of easy to use and consistent sign-ins so that your Facebook, Twitter or Google+ account becomes the gateway to other services on the Internet. Many users are unaware that the price they pay for this service is to release ever greater amounts of their data. Common log-in systems offer the prospect of enabling the tech behemoths to track their activity across the web. The result is a further erosion of privacy and even greater overlapping of the supposedly different personas an individual may have at different social media sites.

The rapid explosion of wearables and health related apps shows that the need for individuals to take control of, and secure their personal data is increasingly important. When one health insurer has pushed the use of a Facebook-owned app onto its customers as the price for them retaining existing benefits it is clear that individuals cannot trust every organisation they interact with to keep their personal data private. What then, for the user who wants to retain control? How do we encourage young people who only know a world of sharing to take control of their data? There are some encouraging signs. iRights contexualises young people’s rights for the digital world. Two of these rights – the right to know who is holding their information and the right to remove personal information – go a long way to putting individual users back in control of their identity. The proposed EU Data Protection reforms are likely to include some form of ‘right to be forgotten’, but these in themselves do not help users manage their data on a day-to-day basis.

Individual online identity is not fixed. It is constantly shifting and evolving – like dunes in the sand, but unlike footprints online identity is much harder to erase. Users must understand what individual elements of identity they have made public. As researchers we need to better understand the extent of our online identity and digital footprints. The authors have undertaken the first steps in this project by attempting to capture an individual’s digital footprint. In our on-going study “A Day in the Digital Life” the project aims to create a lightweight, repeatable methodology to quantity the digital footprint of an individual using a broad range of technologies; GPS tracks, phone logs, key-logging software and video technology, in order to interrogate all of a single person’s online activity in one day.

What aspects of your identity are you happy to share online?

#digitalidentities Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

The Future Issue

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Article

Chris Procter

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started my academic career in 1991, the year the World Wide Web was invented and arguably one of the most significant technical innovations in the history of humanity. In a quarter of a century the web, together with digital media more generally, has had and will continue to have a greater impact on education than any other development in our lifetimes. If we reflect on the impact of the web so far we will develop our knowledge of the future.

In a thought provoking article in the Guardian newspaper on 25 June 2015, Simon Jenkins discusses where we are at in the ‘post-digital world’.

A good example is found in the music industry.

When Dylan played an electric guitar at Newport folk festival in 1965 the audience booed, fearing the death of ‘real’ music. The growth of recorded music was thought to presage the death of live music, and with online music streaming from the 1990s onwards this was surely just a matter of time. Who would go and see a band in the future? In fact, live music is booming. There are 900 music festivals in Britain alone this year with an expected attendance of seven million people! Glastonbury has continually developed the live experience over 40 years. Have poetry and books been killed by the Kindle? Poetry and literary festivals are booming. The crowds will all have their phones, but listening and looking online is not comparable to the live experience. You can meet people online but Tinder’s rapid growth is because it enables dating very quickly and simply. The importance of the “live experience” is growing, facilitated and augmented by ever more sophisticated digital media.

This is the future.

Understanding the power of live experience is fundamental to the future of education. Some years ago we thought that perhaps online learning would become increasingly sophisticated, cheaper and more accessible and then who would want to attend a University? Online learning has indeed improved and will continue to do so. There has been rapid growth in online learning, but when I recently asked students on one of our online courses what the best aspect of the course was – they all replied that it was the live session, meeting and working with other students and tutors. Fees have not deterred students. University numbers are growing.

The importance of the “live experience” is growing, facilitated and augmented by ever more sophisticated digital media.

The Future Issue

Don’t underestimate the power of live experience.

Some years ago a colleague, Aleksej Heinze, and I conducted some research on blended learning.

We were keen to point out then (which bears repeating now) that a “blend” is not a mixture of digital media and live experience in the same way that a good meal is not just a mixture of ingredients.

Effective blended learning is a combination of digital media (including online learning) and live experience designed on the basis of research and continuous improvement. Given that all learning will be blended to some degree in the future, it follows that the tutor of the future needs an understanding of the best elements of the blend and how to combine them. Use of new technology will be essential and will change, but the real wow for the student will remain the live experience.

It is this part of the blend that has to be designed and planned with great thought and care. The live experience will also continue to change and needs to be continually adjusted to ensure that the blend is never just a bland mixture.

What are your best live experiences in education?

#livepower Comment @salfordbizsch on Twitter

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