Interesting story about one of our students Patrick Bonfils who worked in China as part of his summer project for his dissertation on the MSc in E-Business and Innovation
http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/news/23408/beijing-placement/
7 months ago • 4 noteshello,
Just to inform you that we have a virtual open day for the MSc in E-Business and Innovation programme on Friday the 18th of February 2011. For our programme, we will start at 12pm UKtime until 1-30pm.
If you cannot make it, you can always contact us at any time, my email is email:d.soopramanien@lancs.ac.uk
for more information about the open day here’s the link:
http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/events/postgraduate/22039/
best wishes
Didier
Dr Didier Soopramanien
Programme Director of the MSc in E-Business and Innovation
1 year ago • 10 notes
John Easton - an IT Executive and Technical Leader at IBM - gave a well-received talk on the business challenges of cloud computing to EBIN and ITMOC students as well as faculty. He stressed how cloud computing responds to IT customers’ need to do more with a lot less, i.e. reduce capital expenditures and operational expenses, by switching to a pay-per-use IT delivery model. He also discussed cloud computing in terms of reducing risk, providing higher quality services and breakthrough agility. However, an issue is market maturity as well as the legal and political contexts of cloud, or ‘cloudification’
1 year ago • 5 notes
Congratulations to the EBIN graduates from the 2009-10 cohort! We were delighted to welcome back our students for the graduation ceremony which took place on Wednesday 15th of December 2010. It was great to catch up with the cohort from 2009-10 and to meet the relatives and friends of the graduates. Many said that they would miss the place but said that they would stay in touch with the programme in one way or another. The graduates were encouraged to join the EBIN alumni group on Linkedin and Facebook.
We also had an awards ceremony. Tarun Sainani won the prize for the best contributor on the programme. This award is for the student who made the best contribution to the programme and this is voted by the students. Tarun is now a PhD student on the HigWire PhD programme at Lancaster University. Ben Wirtz won the award for best dissertation and for his dissertation he worked on his start up project Handy Elephant (http://www.handyelephant.com/). Ben is still working on his start up business idea. The best student award went to Fanny Cussac. Fanny has been offered a placement at the United Nations office in Geneva.
1 year ago • 3 notes
MSc in E-Business and Innovation graduate Chris Ramsbottom returned to Lancaster recently to give a guest lecture on how his company, Premier Farnell, uses Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate knowledge exchange.
Chris, who completed the MSc in E-Business and Innovation (EBIN) in 2007, demonstrated Premier Farnell’s new online community, element14, and the company’s use of social media.
Premier Farnell distributes electronic components to millions of Electronic Design Engineers (EDEs) around then globe. element14 is a new online information and collaboration portal aimed at this unique customer base.
element14 utilises Web 2.0 technologies to allow EDEs to share information, access free tools and software, and acts as a one-stop-shop to allow them to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. Chris spoke to students about the challenges of starting a new online community from scratch, the various internal and external stakeholders involved, and finished by talking about the role of social media in the launch of element14 and its wider use in providing customer support and feedback.
As well as this lecture, Chris also attended an EBIN workshop and worked with the students to help provide real-life business scenarios of the topics that they were discussing that week.
2 years ago • 9 notesLancaster University EBIN students Lucy Read, Przemyslaw Kowalski, and Costantinos Rougeris have won the first stage of the Forum Nokia Mobile Games Competition 2009.
More than 40 students from different disciplines attended GameJam@InfoLab21 - a 24hr mobile game design competition for university students initiated by Forum Nokia and co-organized by the Mobile Radicals at InfoLab21.
The competition, which was held at InfoLab21, the University’s centre of Excellence for ICT, on February 27 and 28, provided students with the unique opportunity to hear from leading experts in design, games and innovation together with Nokia Champions Dr. Paul Coulton and Dr. Reuben Edwards.
The contest saw students working away in to the small hours at InfoLab21 - eating, sleeping and breathing mobile games. The winners of the UK heat now have the chance to go through to the next round of the competition where they could win an all-expenses paid trip to San Francisco and present their game design at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).
Lancaster University has great strengths in mobile gaming.
Dr. Paul Coulton said:
“At Lancaster we have been researching in mobile gaming since its inception only ten years ago and have done much to pioneer gaming experiences unique to the mobile phone.
“We allow the general public to download and experience our games for themselves - for example two of our mobile widget games have in excess of 1 million users between them.
“This has earned us an international reputation within the Industry - enabling us to run competitions such as this one in collaboration with Nokia and N-Gage and having regular invites to speak at the main industry event GDC.”
The two winning games were Gardens of Karma and LiveIT.
Gardens of Karma created by Infolab21 students Carlos Garcia Wylie, Kate Lund, and Mark Lochrie encourages people to perform small acts kindness which enable them to grow a Garden of Karma - displayed on their own phone and can be linked social networking sites such as OVI and Facebook.
LiveIT, created by Lancaster University Management School students Lucy Read, Przemyslaw Kowalski, and Costantinos Rougeris. is a Location-based Advert game allowing players to find, buy and trade virtual objects which are unique and geo-referenced.
The event was supported by Nokia, InfoLab21 and North West Vision + Media, which works on behalf of the digital and creative industries in the Northwest to grow a world-class digital and creative economy within the region.
Enda Carey, Head of Games and Digital Content at Northwest Vision and Media, judged at the event and said:
“As part of our remit to support the digital and creative industries within the Northwest we are keen support up and coming talent within this sector.
GameJam gave us a great opportunity to do this and as a judge I was impressed with the level of innovative and creative ideas produced as a result of the competition.”
3 years ago • 5 notesToday Jyoti Banerjee from Agitavi gave a talk to EBIN students about emerging business models for Software-as-a-Service (Saas). Agitavi is a world-wide business research and consulting firm specializing in business strategy, services marketing and, software innovation management and entrepreneurship.
Jyoti discussed the technical opportunities of SaaS but highlighted the fact that it is far from certain how business can make effective use of this technology. In particular he pointed to the lack of business models for SaaS and the need for trusted advisors and aggregators.
Jyoti is an accomplished entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is a director of Agitavi Research Europe where he specialises in creating and driving new strategic initiatives in technology companies, with particular experience in application software enterprises.
Jyoti has spent 17 years working with technology companies, running an analyst research company with offices in London and Silicon Valley, and also founding a B2B publishing enterprise. In 2005 he co-founded M Institute, a think-tank that promotes opportunities and recognition for medium enterprises. His projects have covered international business expansion strategies, acquisitions, business process automation, strategic tie-ins and corporate social responsibility. His clients have included companies such as Microsoft, SAP, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Navision and Great Plains.
Jyoti writes a blog at www.kiteblue.net
3 years ago • 0 notesIn 2007 EBIN student Ammar Waheed spent a few months in Pakistan to investigate business and technology aspects of WIMAX wireless broadband technology. This research was part of his EBIN Industry Consultancy Project in preparation for his MSc dissertation.
Ammar just now informed me that he got hired by Telenor, one of the firms he worked with during his dissertation. His role at Telenor is Innovation Project Manager with a focus on mobile telephony, 3G implementations and WiMAX solutions.
When Ammar came to me in 2007 to ask if I was willing to supervise him, he had already made contacts to firms in Pakistan and drafted a project plan (only few EBIN students define their own industrial project and dissertation topic; most pick one of the project we offer).
As part of the project Ammar interviewed managers to identify business opportunities and business drivers, and observed the construction of transmission towers and installation of networking equipment. His dissertation is a rare example of academic research to focus on the opportunities of broadband wireless technologies in emerging and developing countries.
Ammar Waheed (left) and myself (right)
3 years ago • 2 notes12 of our 23 EBIN students this year (2008/09) have signed up for the SAP TERP1e online course with the goal to become SAP certified. Students will have one year to complete the course, but most are expected to take the examination in August. The SAP Consultant Certification: Solution Architect ERP - Integration of Business Processes with SAP ERP 2005 is awarded to those passing this exam
I wish them the best of luck!
3 years ago • 1 noteSAP knowledge and skills are increasingly becoming important for IT and business graduates. I am thus very excited about a new initiative by SAP that enables our EBIN students to gain a professional certification in SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
Starting this year, all EBIN students are eligible to take the TERP1e online course run by SAP that includes the following subjects: ERP Basics, SAP NetWeaver, Procurement Cycle, Material Planning, Lifecycle Data Management, Manufacturing Execution, Inventory Management, Sales Order Management, Asset Management, Customer Service, Project Management, Human Resource Management, Financial Accounting, Management Accounting, Business Intelligence, Strategic Enterprise Management.
Students will have one year to complete the course which is offered at an additional cost of approximately £400.
Here is a good resource for students who are interested in a career related to SAP: http://www.sapfans.com/forums/index.php
SAP has strategic partnerships with the most important IT and business consulting firms and thus an investment in SAP skills opens a host of opportunities:
The new academic year brings exciting changes to the MSc in E-Business and Innovation.
We have added two new modules:
(I talked about EBIN526 System Dependability in an earlier blog entry).
EBIN527 Software Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a project-based course in which students, working in small groups, investigate issues that are relevant for starting and managing a software business. Students will learn how to think and act as a software entrepreneur and tackle issues that lie at the boundary of technology and business.
The course is based on a case study of a recently started entrepreneurial software company. With tutorial guidance, students will explore key issues for the success of this software company and develop a business and technology strategy. Students learn first-hand about making decisions about products and business strategy in the software industry. Specific skills are developed such as networking, analyzing competitors, defining a product road-map, and choosing and implementing a software development process.
The most fundamental benefits, however, are that students learn to view software as a realistic and exciting entrepreneurial opportunity.
3 years ago • 1 noteAs in years before, EBIN510 - Innovation was the EBIN module that our students liked the best during the academic year 2007/08. The course is taught by Prof Mary Rose and Mike Parsons. Students especially like Mary’s and Mike’s innovative teaching style that doesn’t rely on lecturers but makes extensive use of online discussions, learning logs and interactive workshops.
Congratulations!
Prof Mary Rose
Professor of Entrepreneurship
Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development
Management School
Lancaster University
According to Gartner Group’s 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs, 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward “IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy.” The question is now how business and IT strategy can be linked and how a firm can use IT to achieve break-through innovation. Increasingly the answer lies in an development and management approach that focuses on IT architecture. The EBIN programme at Lancaster University is one of a very few programmes that explores this topic.
An IT Architecture-centric approach is based on the understanding that IT systems and strategies must be architected in a manner that creates a portfolio of assets that can be cross-leveraged to reshape IT functions in sync with changing business needs. That means IT’s role has to be understood as far more than a collection of software and hardware applications that implements business functions, but a resource that affords and drives new business functions.
This symbiotic link between business and IT is exactly what modern IT architecture and Enterprise architecture is designed to achieve. An architecture-centric approach to IT development and management can avoid the common operational problems that for too long have plagued organisations: - IT systems that have become unmanageably complex and increasingly costly to maintain. - IT systems that are hindering the organization’s ability to respond to current, and future, market conditions in a timely and cost-effective manner. - Mission-critical information that is consistently out-of-date and/or just plain wrong. - A culture of distrust between the business and technology sides of the organization.
IT architecture is today recognized as one of the key enablers of innovation in large-scale organisations. The MSc in E-Business and Innovation at Lancaster University is perhaps the only programme in the UK that explores the relationship between IT architecture and innovation from a theoretical and practical point of view. Through our collaboration with IBM we are offering the ‘Managing IT Architecture’ module which is taught by practicing IT Architects, who bring real-world experience into the classroom. Our students are thus in a perfect position to shape the innovation agenda of today’s (and tomorrow’s!) firms.
3 years ago • 1 noteThe new academic year brings exciting changes to the MSc in E-Business and Innovation.
We have added two new modules:
EBIN526 ‘System Dependability’ explores how computer and IT systems can be designed to be dependable. The module takes a broad socio-technical perspective on system dependability, considering a wide range of reliability, availability, safety and security attributes. The focus of the content is not limited solely to software or hardware, but encompasses human and organisational considerations as well. This provides students with a unique “big picture” perspective not found in other similar courses.
I expect that this module will attract considerable attention from students with both a computing and business focus.
(I will discuss EBIN527 Software Innovation and Entrepreneurship in another blog entry)
3 years ago • 0 notesThree of our EBIN students are helping the MET Office, the leading UK weather forecasting service, to define innovative E-commerce solutions. This is part of the students’ industrial summer project and will become the basis for their dissertations. The primary aim of the project will be to increase commercial revenue and to promote the visibility and reputation of the Met Office brand.
The Met Office is a leading brand for weather forecasting in the UK. With world leading scientists in both meteorology and climate research, the Met Office produces a variety of commercial services from weather forecasts for aviators and utility customers to climate consultancy from our prestigious Met Office Hadley Centre. Owned by the Ministry of Defence our Government duties span from working alongside the military both in the UK and abroad to fulfilling our public weather service obligations through our website and the media. 3 years ago • 1 note