Tag Archives: Business Economics and Informatics

19th Uddevalla Symposium: Rethinking Leadership and Gender

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This post was contributed by James Fisk, graduate administrator at the School of Business, Economics and Informatics. Here, James reports from the 19th Uddevalla Symposium, held at Birkbeck from 30 June to 2 July 2016. Read James’s first and second blogs on the symposium.

Trigger logoAre female leaders more efficient in family firms? Does corruption have a gendered effect on small firm performance? These are some of the questions posed at the recent Uddevalla symposium, held in the UK for the first time at Birkbeck’s Bloomsbury campus, between 30 June and 2 July. As part of its stated themes of ‘Geography, Open Innovation, Diversity and Entrepreneurship’ the symposium took time to focus on gender inequality, with TRIGGER (Transforming Institutions by Gendering Contents and Gaining Equality in Research) holding a dedicated paper session to consider the topic.

The question of gender equality among businesses and innovators is a complex one; gender exists as a category long before we enter the workplace and carries with it a variety of social, psychological and material implications. It’s clear that increased gender diversity can have a positive effect on firm performance and, as McKinsey & Company pointed out recently, will be absolutely crucial to global economic growth in the coming years – possibly to the tune of $12 trillion by 2025. However, for both the global economy and society at large to benefit from these prospective dividends, attention must be paid to gender inequality in its current form and its attendant complexities.

Therefore, a much discussed theme of the symposium appeared not so much as, how can we honour an obligation to gender parity, but crucially, how can we unleash the huge productive potential of an equal and diverse workforce and, what are the implications for innovation and entrepreneurship?

Is leadership a gendered role?

A keynote speech from Professor Colette Henry, Head of Business and Humanities at the Dundalk Institute of Technology and CIMR Visiting Fellow, considered the position of female entrepreneurs and innovators through the prism of veterinary practitioners and researchers. Her lecture, the first keynote lecture of the three-day symposium, discussed many of the counter-intuitive features of the sector – notably that there are more than twice as many male as female sole principals, and more than four times as many male directors or equity partners, in veterinary firms, despite women accounting for over 50% of those working or studying in the sector.

Her work suggests that current innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems, despite their propensity to change and evolve, are not sufficiently addressing less visible barriers for women. Professor Henry proposes an ‘integration’ model rather than merely beefing up the curriculum with corrective modules, this, she says, is the way to instil ambitious young females with the confidence and support necessary for them to excel to male dominated positions.

It seems, therefore, that the task of encouraging female innovators and entrepreneurs is one keenly tied to changing perceptions, of decoupling innovation and entrepreneurship from gendered ideas of what makes a good leader or a successful entrepreneur.

Porous Borders

Professor Per-Olof Bjuggren’s paper ‘Are Female Leaders more Efficient in Family Firms?’ also considered how definitions of leadership intersect with wider cultural issues, this time by scrutinising family firms. Professor Bjuggren’s work situates itself at the nexus of two historically gendered leadership roles, head of the family and head of the firm, allowing us to trace the relationship between the two and, ultimately, consider the effects of their intersection.

His work found that, whilst the effect of female CEO’s in non-family firms is ambiguous, female leaders in family firms had a positive impact upon the fortunes of the business. Whilst he proposes further research to unpack this assertion, his findings are crucial to understanding how the question of leadership is not one to be solely directed at businesses, but also society and culture at large. The quest for gender equality and equity cannot be an isolated and compartmentalised pursuit, as indicated by Professor Bjuggren’s work, it must look to consider the porous borders between whom we are at home and who we are at work.

You can see the winners of the 19th Uddevalla Symposium best paper awards on their site. To see the ways in which Birkbeck are tackling gender inequality, please visit TRIGGER’s webpage, as well as viewing the various networking and mentorship programmes such as ASTREA and AURORA.

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19th Uddevalla Symposium: Is the Future Open?

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This post was contributed by James Fisk, graduate administrator at the School of Business, Economics and Informatics. Here, James reports from the 19th Uddevalla Symposium, held at Birkbeck from 30 June to 2 July 2016. Read James’s first blog on the symposium.

Delegates attend the Open Innovation session at the Uddevalla Symposium hosted by Birkbeck

Delegates attend the Open Innovation session at the Uddevalla Symposium hosted by Birkbeck

The future is, and has always been, a contested space. A space in which hopes and fears of the present are projected and embellished, a destination we’re heading toward without having quite figured out all of the co-ordinates yet.

In a world changing as rapidly as ours, as new data streams emerge and we’re able to map the world in ways never thought possible before, attention must turn to the historic driver of change: innovation. Indeed, as odd as it sounds, innovation itself, or rather the mechanisms of innovation, must keep up with the times. The concept of Open Innovation, coined by Henry Chesbrough in his book ‘Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology’, takes this proliferation of data as its core consideration and asks that innovators remain open to a newly communicative world of research, ideas and data. So, what will a world invested in Open Innovation look like and is it the right model for innovators today?

Uddevalla and Open Innovation

A glimpse of this possible future arrived at Birkbeck between 30th June and 2nd July 2016 as the topic of Open Innovation was explored at the 19th Uddevalla Symposium. The annual symposium, held in the UK for the first time, invited over 150 academics, business leaders and practitioners from 27 countries to Birkbeck’s Bloomsbury campus to discuss, share and ruminate on the topic of Open Innovation – as part of this year’s ‘Geography, Open Innovation, Diversity and Entrepreneurship’ theme. The three day symposium saw keynote lectures in the morning and parallel paper sessions in the afternoon bring together diverse strands of research, with the Bloomsbury campus alight with fervent discussion and debate.

A keynote lecture from Professor Jennifer Clark, Director of the Centre for Urban Innovation at Ivan Allen College in the US, gave a tantalising insight into how Open Innovation is changing the dynamics of both private and public sector innovation. Her lecture, ‘Smart Cities and Social Entrepreneurship: Remaking Markets and Manufacturing Open Innovation Spaces’ discussed how future cities that best utilise advances in technology, particularly advances in logistics and data, will benefit the public, private and third sectors mutually. However, such advances are reliant on open platforms for software and effective, equitable technology diffusion. An attendant commitment to Open Innovation from both the private and public sector would be necessary too; the task of reengineering cities as sites of both innovation and sustainability is a challenging one with implications for all businesses, public services and third sector parties. Professors Clark’s timely lecture comes as the US city of Columbus has just been awarded $40 million dollars by the U.S Department of Transportation, to create innovative solutions for the future of urban mobility, undoubtedly a tentative first step toward the actualisation of Smart Cities.

Are we open or closed?

CIMR logoA utopian ‘internet of things’ however, is perhaps not as close as advances in technology suggest. The question of which model of innovation actually produces the greatest benefit is one fiercely debated and was the subject of the best paper award winner ‘The Paradox of Openness Revisited: Collaborative Innovation and Patenting by UK Innovators’.  The paper, written by  Professor Ashish Arora (Fuqua School of Business, Duke University), Professor Suma Athreye (Brunel Business School, Brunel University) and Dr. Can Huang, (Institute for Intellectual Property Management, School of Management, Zhejiang University), explores two seemingly contradictory strands of contemporary thought: should businesses innovate openly or protect themselves from ‘knowledge spill over’ and patent?

Their findings suggest that the answer is contingent on a number of factors, most notably the relative size of the business and whether it leads or follows in its chosen market. Their research edifies an ongoing debate among innovators, are we open or closed?

For more information about the 19th Uddevalla Symposium, you can visit their website. To see future events hosted by the Centre for Innovation Management Research, please visit their webpage.

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‘Geography, Open Innovation, Diversity and Entrepreneurship’: 19th Uddevalla Symposium at Birkbeck

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This post was contributed by James Fisk, graduate administrator at the School of Business, Economics and Informatics. Here, James reports from the 19th Uddevalla Symposium, held at Birkbeck from 30 June to 2 July 2016.

Delegates network at the 19th Uddevalla Symposium held at Birkbeck this summer

Delegates network at the 19th Uddevalla Symposium held at Birkbeck this summer

“Silicon Valley is a mind-set, not a location” Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, once said. Indeed, his emphasis on ethos over geography is an interesting one, but successful entrepreneurial ecosystems, in an age of innovation increasingly dominated by monoliths such as Google and Microsoft, can be far more challenging and problematic than his assertion suggests. Can, and should, an innovation system such as Silicon Valley be replicated elsewhere?

This was just one of many questions up for discussion as Birkbeck hosted the 19th Uddevalla Symposium between the 30th June and 2nd July, the first time the symposium has been held in the UK. The three-day symposium which looks to bring together cutting edge research from leading academics, researchers and practitioners invited attendees to consider this year’s themes of ‘Geography, Open Innovation, Diversity and Entrepreneurship’.

Invited by Birkbeck’s Centre for Innovation Research Management (CIMR), researchers from across the globe came together for the annual symposium, with over 50 papers up for discussion, over 150 attendees arriving from 27 countries and expertise from fields as diverse as Canadian aerospace and Swedish E-Government.

Master of Birkbeck, Professor David Latchman CBE, conducted the formal opening of the event and welcomed an array of scholars, entrepreneurs and researchers to the college. Over the following three days, attendees heard keynote speeches from leading scholars in the morning, before parallel paper sessions saw fervent debate spread across Birbeck’s Bloomsbury campus in the afternoon. With at least four parallel sessions available on each day, it was a productive and busy few days for those interested in entrepreneurship and innovation.

As the latest research from across the world was to be found at Birkbeck, the symposium offered the chance for not only sharing papers, but for formulating new ideas and cultivating collaboration across industries, disciplines and national borders.

Speaking at the event, Birkbeck Professor of Entrepreneurship Helen Lawton Smith said: “It’s a huge privilege to host this event and bring together diverse and important strands of research in one place.”

CIMR logoSo, can, and should, we look to replicate Silicon Valley? The answer is, unfortunately, not as straight forward as the question. With Keynote speeches such as Professor Wim Vanhaverbeke’s (Hasselt University) ‘Open Innovation in SMEs’ and Professor Gary Cook’s  (University of Liverpool) ‘Cities and International Entrepreneurship: Towards an Integration of International Business, Economics, Geography and Urban Economics Perspectives’ attesting to the many complex regional and international factors that make-up often delicate entrepreneurial ecosystems across the planet.

The annual symposium ended on Saturday 2nd July, with PhD candidate Tina Wallin (Jönköping International Business School) winning the best PhD candidate paper award for her paper ‘Labour Knowledge Complementarity and Firm Innovativeness’. Professor Ashish Arora (Fuqua School of Business, Duke University), Professor Suma Athreye (Brunel Business School, Brunel University) and Dr Can Huang (Institute for Intellectual Property Management, School of Management, Zhejiang University) won the best paper award for their work ‘The Paradox of Openness Revisited: Collaborative Innovation and Patenting by UK Innovators’.

Those wishing to read more can find a wealth of information on the Uddevalla symposium website, where you can find working papers, previous winning papers and keep track of upcoming events. For similar events looking at innovation and entrepreneurship, check out Birkbeck’s Centre for Innovation Management Research (CIMR) webpage.

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Graphs and Paths: Professor Peter Wood’s inaugural lecture

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This post was contributed by Riccardo Frosini, PhD student in Birkbeck’s Department of Computer Science and Information Systems. On 6 June, Riccardo attended the inaugural lecture of Professor Peter Wood. Here he reports on the lecture.

Cloud computing

The Department of Computer Science and Information Systems has announced the promotion to professor of Dr Peter T. Wood. The inaugural lecture to celebrate the event was attended by many colleagues, friends and students.

Professor Wood received his BSc and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town. In 1989 he obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto. He started working at Birkbeck in 2001, where he was Head of School from September 2006 until July 2009.

During the lecture, the audience could recognise his commitment and passion to his field of study as well as his humble personality. His lecture was focused on graph theory, in particular the recurring topic that has kept him busy over the years: Queries on Graphs.

Querying graphs

Professor Wood introduced the lecture by showing the importance of graph theory in history: from the Bridges of Koenigsberg problem to the more recent Linked Open Data project.

A graph is a collection of nodes or entities which are connected by edges. Entities can be an abstract representation of real world data and the edges represent the connections between them. Graphs are also used in social networks, geographical information, computer program analysis, and general knowledge representation.

One example shown during the lecture was an airline graph, where the entities represent airports and the edges represent flight connections. In this example, the edges can be labelled with different values, such as the number of miles between the airports or the airline companies operating the route.

During his PhD, Professor Wood investigated the computational complexity of querying such graphs.

One of his contributions at that time was to propose the use of regular expressions for finding paths in graphs. He proved that this problem is hard to solve for computers when nodes are not allowed to repeat on paths, but also that the problem becomes tractable when the regular expressions are restricted in certain ways

Querying trees

Professor Peter Wood

Professor Peter Wood

The second topic of research covered by Professor Wood during the lecture was optimising queries on trees.

Trees are particular kinds of graphs. A simple example is the family tree where each node represents a person and each connection is a parent-child relationship. One common language for representing trees is XML (eXtensible Modelling Language) which is often used for data exchange on the internet.

To define constraints on the allowed structure of XML, a schema or DTD (Document Type Definition) often is used, both of which also use regular expressions.

One common query language for XML is called XPath. If an XPath query does not conform to the DTD constraints, then it will not return any result when posed against an XML file. These kinds of queries are called “unsatisfiable”.

Professor Wood has proved that, in general, is computationally hard to check if an XPath query is satisfiable. During his research, he discovered a particular property for DTD’s called “covering”. This property was not only very common in real-world DTDs, but also made checking XPath satisfiability tractable for certain fragments of the XPath language.

Flexible Querying

Professor Wood’s most recent work, undertaken jointly with a number of colleagues and PhD students, is in flexible querying. They added flexible querying to the standard query language for Linked Open Data (a collection of graph databases), called SPARQL 1.1 (which also supports regular expressions).

The flexible querying technique in SPARQL helps users to find answers to queries on Linked Open Data datasets, when they are not familiar with the structure and/or vocabulary of the data.

To generate answers that may be useful to the user, the flexible querying approach poses many different queries over the data. In order to reduce the number of queries posed, Professor Wood investigated the possible impact of discarding queries that were not satisfiable. This was done by the querying system keeping track of the possible paths available in the graph being queried.

Experiments on real data showed that discarding the unsatisfiable queries detected using this approach can result in dramatic improvements in query execution time.

Professor Wood concluded his lecture by mentioning his ongoing and future work, including work on social network applications, generating mappings between distributed Linked Open Data graphs, and further optimisation techniques to speed up the evaluation of queries on graphs.

Click this image to watch Professor Peter Wood’s inaugural lecture on Panopto – Birkbeck’s video platform

Click this image to watch Professor Peter Wood’s inaugural lecture on Panopto – Birkbeck’s video platform

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