Blogging on my personal website

For those who follow this blog, I thought you might wish to know that I will be blogging more on my personal website - http://ireneng.com

Markets, Multiculturalism and Food

So I'm back in my home country Malaysia and of course, my friends on social media will have to live with food porn. Being a foodie, my pics are already quite food-focused but when I return to Malaysia, that goes into overdrive.

One of my more frequent laments when I return is how little has been written about food in Malaysia as a lesson to the world on markets and multiculturalism. I've always considered Malaysia as one of the older multicultural societies in the world, where the society has been shaped by a buoyant trade between the Far East and the West for 500 years. Although not as ancient as Turkey, itself also a gateway to the near East, it is as rich in its cultural mix. And the cultural mix has manifested itself fully in the food that Malaysia has on offer. Admittedly, over the past 10 years, more has been written about this and today we have Jean Duruz's book on Eating Together: Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore, papers on food and multiculturalism by many authors such as Christina Demetriou and multiculturalism from a sociological angle by Daniel Goh in Singapore. 

I'm not an expert in multiculturalism, although I dabble a little in sociology and social identity, primarily because of my work in value. I know more about markets and it's with a market lens that I wish to discuss multiculturalism. 

Let me start with a very simple food item, one I eat too much of when I return to Malaysia. The 'ikan bilis bun'. It's a well-known food item in Malaysia but not available anywhere else. It is made of white bread stuffed with an anchovy chilli chutney of sorts and sold in many convenience shops. It's my comfort food when I am jet-lagged and awake in the middle of the night. The anchovy chutney is clearly Malay in origin, the bread is a legacy of the British (we were a British colony) and the idea of stuffing bread with something is likely to be a Chinese influence because of Chinese foods that bear some resemblance to it such as pork steam buns and the like. 

Within a simple bun, I find a manifestation of generations of multicultural co-existence between the Westerner (I use this term to depict British, Portuguese and other Westerners who have traversed and settled in the country over 500 years), Malays, Chinese and Indians. You can see this across so many combinations of Malaysian food, often not found in China, India, Indonesia and the West. They came to be because of markets that have evolved the mono-cultural food products of the Chinese, Indian, Malays and the West into more creative and innovative ones and have tapped into the multicultural environment in Malaysia to refine all its combinations. Where they have worked, such as with the humble ikan bilis bun, Malaysians have praised with demand. 

The reason I am blogging about this is because Malaysia is currently going through tense times in race and multicultural relations. 500 years of peaceful co-existence seem to be set aside as each race renegotiate its own social identity in a modern world of fundamentalism and geopolitical tensions. I suppose what I really want to say is that we have voted for a harmonious existence for 500 years with our spending and eating habits, through our markets, whatever the political rhetoric espoused. And when each race suddenly becomes aware of the differences between one another, it might be useful to remember the amazing food we have created together. The markets spoke of our integration even before we were even aware of our differences.

Me, Inc as a HAT

Today's corporations use IT to be incredibly efficient and effective. There are IT systems for finance, accounting, inventory management, supply chains, material and enterprise resource planning. All the tools necessary for the corporation be viable and profitable amid constraints of regulation. Corporations hold vast amounts of data to achieve this. Data about production, materials, inventory, data about customers, in fact, nothing can be achieved within the modern corporation today without data and information. The corporation is also able to buy digital services of all sorts to analyse, process and make decisions from the data, from sorting out accounting to HR. Indeed, many corporations outsource and buy in capabilities that are not core to their competencies.

Today's individuals are also using IT to also be efficient and effective. Aided by the Internet, www and our smartphones, we can organise our lives and our families, work from home, have information access at our finger tips. But in terms of computational capability, data and our ability to buy digital services, we are very far behind the corporation. Where they have data on inventory, we barely know what is in our cupboards and fridges. Where they can buy services that augment their abilities, we can just about buy a translator, maps, currency exchange. Where corporations can look back on data to inform better future decisions, we can barely recall what we ate last week. Where corporations can be omniscient through their devices and sensors, we can just about put up a camera to check on our house remotely.

The market doesn't seem to work in our favour. More firms are coming into the digital space to share our data amongst one another, asking us for our permission to do so but the revenue models are usually ad driven or worse, selling our data, albeit anonymised, to other firms. We are starting to use our Facebook or Twitter identity data to sign on to other digital services and allowing whatsapp or LinkedIn to tap into our contact list. Essentially, as more digital applications proliferate, the more we are being harvested for our data and the more we are being sold advertising.

Two factors contribute to this. First, we often place little value on our own data, and are prepared to sign them away for the simplest service e.g. the way we give away browser cookies to peruse a website. It is as though the corporations out there find our data precious but we, because we don't have use of them for ourselves, have little regard for the data. Second, we don't have computational or system capability to use our data as well. We don't have a software platform that enables better well being, integrating different data, not like corporations do. Firms can buy software platforms for enterprise planning, organising and coordinating but we can't. In addition, human beings use data quite differently from corporations. We cluster data and usage of objects according to our day to day contexts. Data from Tesco shopping, car journey and school pickup are bundled together more meaningfully as a "mummy run" context than saying something to grocery, automotive and education vertical sectors.

So how do we square this? Within the HAT project team, we've spent a lot of time thinking about personal data and we are aware of the Digital Catapult laudable effort to create a framework to ensure privacy, security, confidentiality and trust for personal data. When it is ready, we would certainly buy in to such a framework. Meanwhile, we are taking a much faster route.

If corporations have so much computational powers, abilities to buy services, use data effectively and have rights to keep their own data private, then why don't we just make a corporation out of everyone? Why can't each person have a server identity, much like an online shop is a server. If our relationship with our host provider is the same type of relationship between Tesco and their server hosting provider, the relationship would certainly be more equitable and I assume the host would not have a right to poke around Tesco's data. More importantly, if I decide to change hosts, I can move all my data to a different host. Essentially, I can be my own 'corporation' with my own 'personal resource planning' platform with inventory of my stuff, data about my health, well being, etc. In fact, if I have the HAT, there would be an easy way to buy apps to view, analyse, and organise my data.

As we begin the alpha release of the HAT in September to our experimental group of 100 users, and later on to a wider community, I am mindful of the implications if we truly succeed in this. If we do, we would essentially be looking at potentially half a billion people being 'corporatised' this way when they sign on to get their own HATs. And as they do so, they will be empowered to store, analyse, buy apps and manage their data like they have never been able to do before and more importantly, they will be able to speak to corporations 'server-to-server', API to API, leveraging on the legal framework that binds firm to firm relationships that is far more equitable than firm to consumer relationships. Some individuals may decide to bring emails back to their own server, since the ontology of the HAT schema flattens data and therefore can help combine email data with other data for better planning, searching and organisation. It feels terribly powerful to have your own server, even if what you have to organise is only your own data. But the platform would certainly be attractive to developers who can create better applications to help us view, analyse, track and organise your own data that could be combined with third party datasets for better matching or recommendation services. The amazing thing about the HAT is that as a server, you can also share your data in a "peer-to-peer" manner. This means I can share my location on a realtime basis (e.g. My iPhone location data) with my husband so when he pulls out his hat, he can see my location that is shared with him and it's no one's business except the two of us. And the apps I buy to view, analyse and organise my data would not have access to my data as its like me buying a piece of software in the old days and installing it on a PC not connected to the Internet. But if I do want to share it, I can just create a data debit (which is the way all HAT data leaves the HAT) and share it with whoever I please for a time period of my choosing. Such is the HAT. A personal resource planning system for the individual. Finally.

Even as we get ready to release the HAT over the next 6 months, I have not missed the irony that the way we have engineered a market for personal data to give control and empowerment back to the individual is to make us look like firms. Making ourselves a mirror image of the firm's digital presence might get us some respect and fair treatment, within the prevailing legal framework governing business-to-business relationships rather than being treated as passive consumers being harvested for our data. Perhaps. Wouldn't it be funny to have Amazon concerned about their data being harvested when they come to the HAT platform to provide buying recommendations. But it's ok. It's all API to API so everyone would share exactly what they are willing to share. Such is the equitability of a B2B system. I believe we have one chance, and the timing is now, at the cusp when the two major industries of manufacturing is colliding with the Internet through the Internet-of-Things, that we can jump in and introduce a system that brings back control to the individual, in a way that is innovation and economy friendly. And we will need courage. From firms, government, individuals who will back our revolution to reclaim our own data and control when the time comes to launch the HAT initiative publicly in the next few months.

And what of democracy then, when this HAT server that is the augmented and amplified us is able to interact with governments and firms on a more level playing field? Would we finally get more collective power as a society through better coordination, better collaborative consumption through standardised platform that is scalable for apps to interact with and yet uniquely personal to us as individuals with our own data? We wait to see. I have spent more than 20 years helping firms with value, worth, service and their business/economic models to generate more profits. Seems helping individuals to be 'firm'-like could be a win-win for all with better control for individuals, yet innovation friendly, creating more jobs and greater opportunities in the digital economy.

Finally, if this is truly successful, I am also mindful that the divide between those who can afford an augmented and amplified self through a server and those who cannot. It could potentially create a bigger divide between the haves and have-nots. The HAT would be free, up to a degree of storage and depending on who you choose as your HAT host, much like www is free. Yet, the asset of our own HAT is to have more of our own data in it so that it can be leveraged for services and exchanges. If the well being of society is at stake, then it is our interest to ensure every one, young and old, rich or poor, be given a HAT. Fortunately, the entire ontology, schema and database is open sourced and free for anyone to innovate on. Although, if you are a user and do not want to build your own software. you might prefer to just get it off a HAT platform host. In the UK, this would be http://EnableiD.com and in Singapore http://nogginasia.com. More HAT platform hosts are coming soon in your country so check this space. To be one of the first to get a HAT, sign up here.

Watch out for the HAT white paper on "why everyone should have a HAT: implications for government, industry and society" soon to be released in September. Sign up to be informed of the HAT release activities here. 

Three research challenges: my presentation at the NSF Workshop on service innovation

As a workshop participant at the NSF workshop (http://ccss.ucmerced.edu/nsf-workshop-attendee-info/), I presented what I consider to be the 3 main theoretical challenges for service research. Note that this is not the applied challenge - that is a different challenge entirely and would be a different conversation regarding my work at the institute with industry. Rather, I have focused on theoretical and fundamental challenges because this workshop is about guiding fundamental research, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and National Academy of Science.

I begin by saying that my approach doesn't assume any sacred cows of knowledge. Instead, I propose that most of our disciplinary knowledge exhibit historical path dependencies and the many assumptions from that history has changed. In other words, when you want to build a house in the 21st century for living, you might need to go back and evaluate the nature of your bricks, wood, mortar and cement and their ability to come together for that modern house, when those materials were made to build a different house 100 years ago.

So what are the challenges?

The customer as endogenous in the system

From a service dominant logic perspective, service is co-creation ( Vargo, Maglio & Akaka, 2008). That means the customer is part of the system and not outside the system. Current movement from Big Data to many systems methodologies do not often take the customer as endogenous in the system. There is a need to develop methodologies, that treat the customer as being an entity in the system ie as a human sensor, a human intelligence, meanings/context creator i.e. a resource integrating and contributing entity.... Something.... We talk about customer as behaviours but not as an endogenous entity within the system (co-creation by another name for scientists and engineers). For example, even when we talk about material technologies, we can talk about its resistive, absorptive etc. properties. Why do we not talk about customer and their abilities within the system. Why do we not talk about their capability to absorb variety (a big capability to scale systems) or their resilience. Because we lack the methodology and the science to understand that. Second, there are two ways to research into at an aquarium as a system: as a viewer looking into at an aquarium, or as a fish within the aquarium. In the former, the research is for the benefit of the manager/policy maker/owner of the aquarium. In the latter, the research is for the benefit of the fish. We need to question the position, mindsets and perspective of the researcher when constructing systems methodologies and the findings from the research. This is becoming increasingly important as customer resources to co-create value is evolving into a more structured resource e.g. personal data. The customer, being a more formalised entity and increasingly empowered through technologies is a driver for future economic opportunities as both a consumer as well as a producer. The application of personal data in co-creating value with a product or service can be a massive multipler effect for the future personal data economy and national economies of the future.

The incomplete product

The boundary between a service and a material product is increasingly obscured. As material technologies evolve, a physical product can be designed to be more dynamically reconfigurable in order to fit in the diverse and dynamic interactions of actors in their contexts. Dynamic reconfigurability as a concept has been widely used in system design, which enable the system to ‘have the capability to modify their functionalities, adding or removing components and modify interconnections between them’ (Rana, Santambrogio and Sciuto 2007).  With the development of pervasive digital technology, dynamic reconfigurability becomes possible in future products because products could have a ‘reprogrammable nature’. This means products could have new capabilities even after a product or tool has been designed, manufactured and sold (Yoo, Boland and Lyytinen 2012, p.1399).  Thus, products may not need to be ‘finished’ to be transferred to the customer but could be designed such that contexts of use could be incorporated into a modular product design and ‘finished’ through customer resources (e.g. personal data) brought into consumption through digital pervasive technologies.  This ‘incompleteness’, resulting in open and flexible boundaries of products, allows offerings to materialise multiple affordances and dynamically alter their affordances with changing contexts. Products evolve to become platforms for service that could provide increasing returns to scale through standardisation even while they can be deeply and uniquely personalised. For example, the iPhone is fully standardised and enjoys economies of scale yet is able to be fully personalised, because of the boundary between the digital ‘app’ layer and the material ‘phone’ layer.

New Transaction Boundaries, Economic and Business Models

An economic model is the model of an ecosystem (like a market) that distributes rents (or revenues) either through the pricing mechanism or regulation, according to what the entity (such as a firm) does to stay within the ecosystem. New economic models, often arising from new business models and/or new entrants, redistributes rents within the ecosystem occasionally resulting in the exit of existing entities (disruption). With the blurring of boundaries between material and digital, firm and customer, product and service, there is a need to understand new ways to obtain revenues and the nature of transactions in the future digital service economy. Transaction is defined as ‘mutually agreed-upon transfers with compensation within the task network’ and ‘serves to divide one set of tasks and others’ (Baldwin, 2008, p.156). Baldwin's (2008) conceptualisation of transaction is developed from a ‘systems of production’ perspective.  This perspective enables us to analyse the dependencies between agents (i.e., consumers and producers). The value-creating context, as a unit of analysis for service, jointly co-created by the customer and the producer, creates an interesting challenge for modularity and product/service architecture for new innovaitons. Modularisations create new thin crossing points where transaction costs are low (p.156) and also create opportunities for new boundaries where new transactions, and new business models can be created. 

The above challenges are not merely research/innovation challenges but impact on education and skills as well as since there are increasingly greater overlaps in domain knowledge, particularly between engineering and computer science and current reductionistic curriculum is not helping in developing future engineers/technologists and managers.

The HAT (hubofallthings.com)

We live in a world today where data belongs to those who collect it. So even though it's data about me, for example, if it's my purchases at a supermarket, searching online, or spend on my credit card, that data is owned by the supermarket, or by google or by the bank because they own the technology that made the data collection possible. Without the technology, this data won’t even exist. But since we don’t own it and often don’t even have access to it, we can't really benefit from integrating it to make our own lives better. In fact, even if the data is returned to us, we don’t really know what to do with it coz these data are vertically silo-ed – the format and presentation – were all collected to help the institution that collected it and not to help us.

So we now find ourselves in an increasingly digital and connected world where much of our lives can be captured digitally – very diverse types of data on transactions, interactions, movement of people and objects –what we often term as BIG DATA. And as things become connected, through the Internet-of-Things, even more data is being generated.

But again, all this data sits somewhere else owned by different institutions.

And then, as individuals, we become increasingly worried about  privacy, confidentiality, security and trust.

Some of us may get so worried we start to withdraw from becoming too digitally visible, we cancel our Facebook accounts, we stop using google, we don’t want our data stored anywhere because we worry who has what data about us.  Government then takes up this privacy and security issue and could start to regulate, thereby increasing costs. In addition, data starts becoming 'noisy' ie its not true (much like the way I use google search to search for answers on my crossword puzzle so that they wont know if its a genuine search). This means the quality of data goes down. With increasing regulation, decreasing quality of data, this could then lead to institutions become reluctant to invest in innovation and make cool stuff and we don’t get more advanced technologies so this all ends badly for everyone. We get into a downward spiral - Less business opportunities, less innovation, less jobs.

How do we reverse this and help the digital economy spiral upwards?

Introducing the HAT project (http://hubofallthings.com)….. it’s a Research Councils UK Digital Economy £1.2m funded project with 6 universities, around 20 researchers and a whole host of companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Dyson, DCS Europe…

The HAT takes on the 3 challenges and we’d like to think that we can solve them all but they need to be solved simultaneously to create a upward spiralling effect.

First, about privacy and confidentiality and the ‘shrinking supply’ and 'quality' of data. We are building a human database where the data is owned by individuals, by us. A bit like your email, your HAT, should contain all the data you would like to have to make your life better. That means a place to hold internet of things data from your home, your personal data from social media, your health data etc. etc. If we own our data, we can use it, so that solves all the sharing issues that vertical industries have and if we keep it secure in our trusted environment like we give our money to our bank, it hopefully solves the security and privacy issue. If we owned our data and we treasure it as a digital asset, and it is valuable and useful to us in the way we lead our lives, we would want to generate more of it, basically become more digitally visible but we’ll only to do that if that data is ours and not belonging to someone else. And since we are using the data for ourselves, we will make sure it is as accurate as possible, solving the quality issue.

Second, about the ‘worth’ and ‘value’ of the data. Remember I said that this is still all vertical data and often, a lot of data scientists looking at big data out there are trying to predict us by putting the data on the inside, and the individual on the outside. But making sense from aggregating vertical data is a bit like making sense of snow drift by analysing snow fall. They’re related but not the same. Vertical data needs to be re-organised and transformed in a 'horizontal’ way so that human beings can make better decisions from data. And data can never tell the whole story. It really shouldn’t because human beings interact with our data and we also like to be in control so the human person isn't a passive. we are more like an intelligent and adaptive sensor in a way. the human person can actually perform a service on the data to help in contextualising it to make it meaningful to ourselves and so that we can use it. We don't just want smart things, we want 'smart us'.

So through a service dominant logic we develop a special kind of database. a human schematic database that organises vertical data according to the way we create value with goods and services and use information to live our lives. And we let individuals co-create that database with their own sense making and intelligence. For example, you can have data about temperature in your home from a smart home, temperature in your car by the car company, temperature data from your office building, and the weather data outside and they come from different sources and institutions. but what you really want to know is 'what is the lowest temperature you will encounter today so that you know what to wear?' And to do that you need to acquire all these data into the HAT and then transform it into something useful for your decisions, which is what the HAT can do. So HAT transforms vertical-type data and transform it into horizontal-type data.

What happens next is the fun bit.

When data is meaningful to us, it is not just of VALUE to us, it is now WORTH something,

So the third challenge for the HAT is about creating a market for all this meaningful data. Having all this data to ourselves isn’t going to be useful if we can’t trade it or exchange it and have it surface in the economy so that GDP would grow, wealth and economy would grow and there are more businesses and more jobs, what Economists will call having a multiplier effect. Having all this data is like having money but you hide it under your mattress - it does no one any good. This is where the HAT is also a market platform. Platforms are like meeting places where exchanges can happen e.g. a singles bar is a platform for single men and single women or a bazaar is where buyers and sellers meet to buy and sell. The HAT is not just a database but also a multi-sided market platform for us as individuals to exchange some of our data so that we can maybe buy services like advice on our health, or get some personalised grocery bundles from our diet data. Doing this will create a market for personal data which is important for the future growth of the digital economy but doing it in a way that it fits our lives better, be more democratic with how data is owned and accessed and in general helping institutions tailor what they offer in a way that is scalable.

This is of course not an easy project. We need ethnographers who research into how we use data in our lives, behavioural economists who looks at how our behaviours change, market economists, to understand the incentives on a platform so that both individuals and firms come together to exchange data and products and services, business models, marketing and operations specialists, computer scientists, database programmers, designers for user experiences. The HAT team has all that capability. The best bit is that we are working for both sides – for institutions so that they can give us good advice and personalised products in a way that is scalable, and for us, so that we own a platform to use data better in the way we make decisions.

In summary, the HAT lets you as an individual acquire data,and build your own repository of horizontal and meaningful data that is useful and can help you make decisions (ie contextualisation), and then lets you decide if you want to trade or exchange with firms for discounts or other cool products and services. and when we create a horizontal platform that fit to human lives, we create the next stage of the internet, that of people and things, and an epic collision of all the vertical industry of manufacturing,service and internet companies…and new horizontal-type business and economic models that is human-centric will emerge, and not just the old ways of doing business. That would be just awesome.

Best of all, we think we can bring TRUST back into the digital economy. And we do that by making all of us, who have largely disappeared into words like 'citizens', 'segments', 'big data' into being unique again, paradoxically by becoming making each one of us a 'server' (standardisation) and yet unique with our own data (personalisation). By doing so, we hope to make the use of data more democratic than it is today.

We think that everyone should have a hat of our own data. like the way we have emails or bank accounts. The HAT will be ready in 2015, and we expect it to be free although you can choose your own HAT trusted provider who could differentiate themselves by giving you additional services, like the way your email service, or your bank does. We want to start a revolution to own, control and use our own data, for the good of the economy! So we hope you will follow our blog at http://hubofallthings.com and be part of that revolution!

PS: if you are a developer or an institution interested to integrate the HAT into your offerings or develop applications on the HAT, please sign up on our blogsite as well! Software toolkit and APIs will be released from July 2014 in a trade launch and October 2014 will see a HATFest where we expect a week of 'show and tell' sessions of interesting applications around the HAT platform! Consultants helping vertical industries evolve new business models in the horizontal or IoT domain also welcomed!

Service systems group away day

Once a year, I take my team on an 'away' day to discuss the past year, the coming year and do some brainstorming and planning. I thought I'll put down my thoughts on this year's agenda. (We are expecting 18 of us).

This year's agenda is set out in 3 sections

State of knowledge: value, service and business models

Given that there are new members of the team, I'll start with a briefing on the background to the team's approach to knowledge in value, service and business models ie the SDLogic approach. I will do a presentation in this space and then discuss who is doing what interesting research in the space globally. I will divide this space into 4 - thinking (concepts and ideas), tinkering (empirical research), tooling (methods, mechanisms, creations) and telling (publishing, teaching, communicating the research) and talk about which academic teams have 'got' the thinking in SDLogic, those who are still in the old school, the links between service, value and the future of disruptive business models and what knowledge is needed disciplinarily in computing, materials, engineering, business (strategy, Marketing, OBHRM, finance, economics etc.) that has impact on new business/economic models ala SDlogic. I will also discuss where I believe more research/thinking is really needed, integrating what everyone in the team is working on, particularly the doctoral students where "we will watch your career with great interest" #starwarshomage ;) and how the cutting edge work we expect from the doctoral students contributes to knowledge overall. This is of special relevance to the future of incomplete products and integration of personal data to future offerings, IoT markets etc.

State of industry: business models

The next discussion is basically a brain dump from me on all that I see is happening for each industry in terms of their business and economic models - financial services, engineering, telecommunication, education, manufacturing, entertainment/creative - I will discuss their markets and their business models, applying the knowledge we have and where I believe each industry will be looking to innovate, the role of regulation etc. more importantly, I will elaborate on where each industry might be going in a hyper connected IoT era, seen from an SDLogic practice perspective.

State of innovation/investment

I don't usually talk about my entrepreneurial activity in a research meeting but I thought this year I will do it since much of our research is entwined with exploitation. In a year, I usually invest between £50k-£100k of my own money either as an angel investor in startups, or investing in my own ideas/creation. I will talk through the year gone past, what I invested in (and what fruits yielded ;p) and what I look to invest in the coming year and what technological domain and business models I will be watching very closely.

Planning

Given all that I have spoken on, I'd like to hear the team's thoughts in terms of skills, capabilities, what areas of research, tools we should be investing in, capacity building etc.

Loads to discuss and I'm looking forward to it!

From Service Systems to Digital Lives

It has been a long time since I posted any content on this blog (did a few announcements, but no substantial content).

So I thought I should come back to my roots in service systems, service science, value co-creation and explain some of the linkages and how my work is moving on. My students and colleagues constantly say to me 'I don't see you for 2 months and you've moved on'. Some say 'you've left service systems and into technology now' and 'I don't recognise your work anymore'. so I thought its best to articulate my thought processes to show there is method and consistency to this madness they have perceived.

Much of my research in this domain have given me insights into service systems, the boundaries between a material product and a service, the relationship between exchange and experienced value in context.

Service dominant logic suggest that value is always co-created in context of use and experience. Co-creation is not an option (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008).

For a few years, I have repeated that again and again on the lecture circuit. Many nodded. Many agreed. It was a logic, a way of looking at the world and it gave insights and understanding. The problem is, it didn't do much more. And I wanted more.

GD logic is not only very entrenched, it is not helping with a world that is increasingly digital and where business models are being disrupted. GD logic and the firm-centric view of the world was also starting to marginalise individuals in a big way with constant incursions into our privacy, all in the name of stimulating the economy. Data business is worth £50b in the US and we're on this slippery slope starting from 'our data is creating new jobs' onto a full scale marginalization of our rights and our privacy.

SD logic could help, but it hasn't really gone beyond a logic to influence people. At worst, people didn't buy in. At best, people were influenced but didn't know how to put it into action. Part of the challenge is because SD logic stayed largely within the business domain and business schools act only on people (through teaching, professional development, MBAs). What was needed were more methods, systems, tools, stuff that could change processes, infrastructures, outputs and materials, and not just people, into an SD logic mindset. SD logic needs to create a whole new set of tools with a new design and engineering philosophy. It's a bit like when lean thinking was just a logic, a way of thinking, although practiced by Toyota. It was a logic but it didn't stay that way. It spawned methods, certification, tools, performance indicators. The kanban, 5S, value stream mapping; the lean black belt holders, etc. All these created an entire community of champions for that way of thinking. We need that for SD logic because otherwise, it isn't going to change the world. The science of service systems, grounded on value cocreation and taking an SD logic view of the world wasnt going anywhere unless we created better linkages and synthesis to the world of technology, engineering and design. And we need to articulate how an SD logic perspective could or should change what they were currently doing.

Alarmingly, papers within the domain of service science and service systems started to appropriate SD logic to justify some GD logic research, often because they did not really understand SD logic.

Moving things along meant a focus on 2 key aspects. philosophy and methods.

In my mind, an SD logic philosophy is clearly grounded on a sociological and existentialist approach rather than a psychological one. Value cocreation and resource integration is something that exists, and can only be seen, in movements, in verbs and in behaviours i.e. phenomenologically. An SD logic approach is not one that you can run a survey of attitude, behaviours or intentions. The person is embedded in his actions and practices of value creation. The focus on context means the unit of analysis is in the sociology of real life behaviours. A sociological approach makes methods a problem because we've inherited a world where we have created tools from analysing water in a bucket, not by looking at its behaviour in a river.

GD logic is compelling not only because it is entrenched for over 500 years, but also because you could measure its constructs. GDP, sales, revenues, CPI - they are all constructs of a GD logic society. What SD logic needed was better methods and new constructs.

To that end, and rather ironically, I found an ally in digital technology. Here was a world of sensors and actuators with an enthusiastic community looking for novel ways of deploying them into homes and buildings i.e. the internet-of-things. Yes, many of the firms were riding roughshod over privacy issues but could we not turn that into better visibility of behaviours, could we not turn the same technologies used on us into technologies empowering us? So I started to study digital technologies in greater detail, albeit with an SD logic eye, coinciding with my move to WMG at University of Warwick. My background in computer programming and applied physics helped, I suppose, but only to the extent of confidence in learning the material quickly. The field has moved on since the 80s. Recently, Jon Crowcroft, our HAT project partner in Cambridge insisted I read Steven Johnson's book 'Future Perfect' as well as Jaron Lanier's book 'Who owns the future'. Both books grounded on the future of digital technologies, but resonated with SD logic and empowerment.

I also found, as an ally, the thinking around new economic and business models. Here was another strand of literature largely marginalised by mainstream business literature because it was (the way I interpreted it) taking a systemic view of value proposition, value creation and value capture (ie, change one, change all) and the way the organisation had to be agile and transformed for it - which sat very nicely with SD logic. Also, being in the heart of a manufacturing community where pervasive digital technologies were starting to create a set of thinking around 'incomplete products' or personalised (and not customised) products, sat even better with the notion of indirect service, suggested by SD logic. (see a great special issue from Organisation Science by Youngjin et.al. on Organising for Innovation in the Digitized World). Customised products are firm centric. Personalised products are customer initiated and empowering. Personalised products also tend to move the product into becoming platforms to afford co-creation, which advanced the notion of symmetry in value co-creation further. Finally, with the advent of platforms, the economics of 2 or multi-sided markets completed my set of theoretical collaborators across economics, business models. manufacturing and technology - aligned to SD logic.

As my research and thinking progressed, I started to think harder into the synthesis between these domains. I found some of the connections to begin with (others could possibly do more) and that synthesis was central in my book 'Value & Worth: Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy' which is now out on Kindle and the printed version by Cambridge University Press out end of the year.

Moving that thinking on, I became convinced that the science of service systems, grounded on SD logic, could not just be a contribution but could create an impact through a carefully designed experiment that could turn the world on its head, empowering the individuals, give us some interesting constructs, methods and measurements in real lives. Thus, together with excellent colleagues in technology and economics, the HAT project was conceptualised. It took some time. We applied to the Leverhulme fund and didn't get the grant and the second outing of the HAT, together with a great team, was funded. I was thrilled. I would highly recommend following the HAT project blog site here. To come to this point was an amazing moment for me and I blogged on the HAT site here. For those who follow SD logic and service science/service systems, you can probably see how it extends the work in the 'background to research'.

I do admit, now having spent years in business, economics, engineering, technology and sociology that I struggle sometimes with the language - Some of my colleagues have accused me of introducing this new 'jargon' that I have developed that is a combination of some 5 disciplines. My approach have been pragmatic - whatever the term or language that persuades you to see the world the way I see it, is what I would use. Not very academic of me (most of my colleagues prefer to argue about definitions). I probably should care, but I don't ;p. Perhaps it might evolve into the jargon of service systems & service science? However, if I know I am speaking to an economist/sociologist/business/technology academic, I would try to use terms in their world -it just makes communicating easier. Inter-disciplinarity comes with a host of interesting issues but I might blog about it some other time.

The HAT project also brought me back into entrepreneurial activity again (a full circle, after being an academic for 15 years) because I didn't just want to create new constructs and methods as an academic, I genuinely want to turn the world inside out, creating an empowered individual and having that balanced and symmetrical view of co-creation and yet create new markets and stimulate the economy. That means the HAT has to move into deployment, becoming a world-wide-HAT so the startup company has to be formed to lead the way. I think I have become Steven Johnson's version of a peer progressive ;)

Watch this space, as well as that of the HAT!