The human factors in innovation and making choices

February 14, 2012
by Lisa Harris

Current issues in Digital Economy research were discussed as part of the University of Southampton’s Multidisciplinary Research Week initiative.

Dr Lorraine Warren and Dr Luke Greenacre from the Southampton Management School presented their work to an audience which included some members of the public who were interested in finding out more about the work of our University Strategic Research Group.

Lorraine spoke about temporality, emergence and value in the creative industries: questions of theory and methodology. She explains: “It should now be easier than it has ever been for everyone to not only access and use new technologies, but to extend them, customise them, develop new combinations, to improve, radically innovate and disrupt how we live our lives and create new value, new futures. However, the roadmap for inductive thinking that will create value in novel and unforeseen ways in new contexts and settings is not clear; classical models of innovation may be too focused on economic value creation at the expense of wider societal benefit.”

Here is an introduction to Lorraine’s work

Luke joined the University of Southampton in 2011. He has previously worked at the Centre for the Study of Choice and the Marketing Discipline Group at the University of Technology in Sydney; the University of Sydney; the University of Western Sydney; and the Australian Institute of Music.

His presentation outlined the theoretical and methodological basis for a new approach to predicting online referral networks: “Through the integration of choice experiments and agent-based modelling techniques, it is intended to build models of how individuals actually behave in real markets, and then observe how this behaviour aggregates at the network level. This could allow us to understand how small changes in communication decisions by individuals can alter market outcomes.”

Categories: Blog. Tags: Lorraine Warren, Luke Greenacre, and MDRW.