ICTs and Collaborative R&D

Seminar, 8 June 2004, 3-5pm, i-studio5

Roberta Lamb, Ph.D., University of Hawaii, Manoa

Abstract

Increasingly, information and communication technology (ICT) uses are transforming professional activities and interactions in ways that challenge traditional assumptions about collaboration, professional identity, and economic growth. This seminar presentation will draw on empirical data from an ongoing study to critically examine the portrayal of ICTs in a two-part model that has guided economic policy conceptualisations in the US and elsewhere.

In the first part of the model, the university/ industry innovation engine, ICTs are expected to enhance instruments of discovery, speed communication, and facilitate collaboration. This production-line view reflects little of what socio-technical researchers have learned about ICT uses in collaboration networks of research and development (R&D), and virtually nothing about the ways in which ICT uses shape professional identity.

In the second part of the model, the university/ industry economic growth engine, ICTs are expected to automate manufacture, speed and enhance informational exchanges, and add efficiencies to distribution. Such results rely on the adoption of traditional organisational forms by commercial firms; even though many new start-ups find such forms unworkable.

Researchers and policy-makers have promoted some new forms, like e-markets, that support key conceptualisations about economic growth, while denigrating others that challenge them. In particular, the growth of hybrid forms of R&D enterprise has been lamented within academia, while analogous hybrids in industry have been dismissed as transient or immature forms of commercial organisation. Academic hybrids are frequently portrayed as being tainted by industry funding and related interests. Industry hybrids, which survive primarily through government-funded research, are often regarded by taxpayers as economically unproductive.

There are two papers for reading before the seminar:

Information and Communication Technology: Challenges to Scientific Professional Identity (PDF), Roberta Lamb and Elizabeth Davidson
Hybrid Organization in High-Tech Enterprise (PDF), Roberta Lamb and Elizabeth Davidson

Roberta Lamb is an assistant professor at the College of Business Administration at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in Enterprises. She is deputy editor of The Information Society. She was joint author of the MISQ 2003 paper of the year Reconceptualizing Users as Social Actors in Information Systems Research (with Rob Kling).

This seminar is part of the ESRC-funded ICTs in the contemporary world: work management and culture series and is open to the public. UK PhD students are particularly encouraged to participate and their travels costs are subsidised. For more information about support for doctoral students email e.s.keys@lse.ac.uk.