Principles of Management

Safecast

An excellent NHK documentary describing the Safecast project in which a volunteer community developed radiation sensors that could be used to quickly monitor the spread of radioactivity following the Fukushima Daichi accident. The film also describes…
Premier Foods “pay-to-stay” policy

Laura Kuenssberg report on BBC Newsnight 5/12/2014 on Premier Foods asking suppliers for payments to stay as listed vendors. In retailing there is an argument for payments to be listed as a supplier because of shared…
Open Data Infrastructures

The wide publication of information as open data allows innovators to build new applications using this data to provide novel services or carry out groundbreaking analysis. Around the World governments and private sector bodies are increasingly…
MAKLab, Glasgow

By providing access to manufacturing equipment fab-labs enable small-scale designers and makers access to equipment to develop their ideas, rather than go down the more expensive and time-consuming route of contracting specialist firms to produce the…
Dark Patterns: Designing Website Interfaces to Sucker Punters

This is an excellent twenty minute video of a slide presentation by Harry Brignull, one of the curators of the Dark Patterns website. Dark Patterns are defined on the site as: “User Interfaces that are designed…
Social Media Research: When Epistemic Cultures Collide

On June 17th the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) published a paper, Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, describing a large-scale experiment on Facebook carried out in 2012. The first…
“Lululemon: A Sheer Debacle in Risk Management” by Larcker, Larcker and Tayan

Larcker, Larcker and Tayan of Stanford University have published an engaging short-case of operational failure escalating into a strategic debacle: Lululemon: A Sheer Debacle in Risk Management. Lullulemon Athletica were aware of the operational risk faced…
Mundane Innovation: from stringers to block pallets

Below is a link to a 17 minute podcast from NPR Planet money on the CHEP blue pallets. The podcast describes how CHEP developed a more expensive but easier-to-use pallet, and then developed an alternative business…
Ken Benoit: Massive non-expert coding of political texts

The stand-out presentation at last month’s Digital Scholarship Day of Ideas at the University of Edinburgh was by Professor Ken Benoit of LSE. Professor Benoit describes how crowdsourcing is an effective and efficient alternative to employing…
#FLInnovation: Futurelearn

The six-week Loughborough University MOOC on Innovation and Enterprise ended this week. The final session addressed developing a business plan and helpfully provided learners with an introduction to the key issues in business plan development. However,…
NYT Innovation Report: Disruptive Innovation

Earlier this week Mashable published online a leaked internal report addressing innovation at the New York Times. This report is an excellent example of Christensen’s disruptive innovation in action, clearly defining the concept, demonstrating how disruptors…
Evidence-Based Practice

Last week the University of Edinburgh Business School hosted a well-attended full-day workshop on evidence-based practice organised by Céline Rojon. The basic premise of evidence-based practice is simple: that organisations should base their practices on the…
#FLInnovation: Intellectual Property

The third week of the Loughborough University MOOC on Innovation looks at intellectual property, including copyright, patents, trademarks and design protection. Just writing that sentence gives some indication of the breadth of this subject area, and…
#FLinnovation: C J Walker, Pyramid Pioneer

The second week of the Loughborough University MOOC on Enterprise and Innovation focuses on the recognition of the opportunities for entrepreneurship. This includes a return to Stelios (is Loughborough University getting cheap air tickets for all…
Futurelearn: Innovation & Enterprise

I encouraged our second year Innovation & Entrepreneurship students to sign up for the FutureLearn MOOC on Innovation and Enterprise which has been produced by Loughborough University, the English Midland’s premier university. I promised I would…
Heartbleed

The OpenSSL project describes itself as “a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as…
Richard Ling – The structuring of mobile communication into social interaction

Below I have embedded the video of a recent talk by Rich Ling of IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Professor Ling examines the development of social cohesion and the structured use of mobile communication in everyday…
Management of e-Reputation in Online Work Exchanges

Recently Dr James Stewart gave a presentation entitled From Crowd to Cloud: the shaping and management of e-reputation in online freelance and crowdsourced work exchanges to Edinburgh University’s Social Informatics Forum. His talk drew on a…
E-punditry & Mr Worrier

Earlier this month I dropped in on a seminar at Edinburgh Napier University’s department of Informatics presented by Lallands Peat Worrier, a leading blogger on Scots law and politics. The seminar was part of Napier’s Informing…
Innovation and Enterprise MOOC

Our second year Innovation and Entrepreneurship course uses the Wiley book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” by John Bessant and Joe Tidd as the recommended text. There are many good entrepreneurship texts out there, and some adequate innovation…

Ian Graham

Ian Graham is a Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at the University of Edinburgh Business School, Edinburgh, Scotland. This blog supports his teaching in operations management, innovation and quality management and provides background on his research…

Teaching

Operations management in Business Studies 1; Innovation & Entrepreneurship 2nd Year Course; Quality Management honours course; Operations Strategy honours course; Operations Management MBA core course.

Research

Standardisation of information technology; management operational risk; serious games for operations management teaching Past Research Projects MyFire EU FP7 project developing the use of experimental Future Internet facilities in Europe Network Enterprise: ESRC project investigating B2B…

MBA Operations Management Course Survey

Posted by iangraham on February 3, 2014

The course monitoring feedback for this course was very disappointing, with the responses falling below programme quality guideline on every question. The key points to be taken from the course survey requiring action are: Dissatisfaction with…

Principles of Management

Ian Graham's Blog on Operations & Innovation.