WMG at the University of Warwick have secured £1.2m grant funding from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) to explore how decentralisation, personal data, and our Internet-connected possessions come together on the Hub of all Things (HAT) platform. The first focus of the WMG team’s project will be issues of privacy and trust in children’s e-books.

The WMG team’s Dynamic, Real time, On-demand Personalisation for Scaling (DROPS) project is a collaboration between academics at the universities of Warwick, Surrey, and the West of England. It will examine the privacy, trust, and identity issues that arise from the development of personalized e-books for children's reading. The researchers’ focus on children's reading is motivated by evidence that shows that despite the value of personalised e-books for learning and reading enjoyment, there is a lack of research that engages with the range of privacy issues that these technologies introduce.

Working with the HAT Community Foundation, a non-profit promoting the use of HAT micro-servers for decentralized, person-controlled personal data, the DROPS project will investigate the technology, business, economic, and legal models of personalisation in a newly decentralised digital economy.

EPSRC awards £1.2m funding to WMG, University of Warwick together with partner universities Cambridge, Surrey and UWE to create the HAT Living Labs.

The Engineering and Physical Science Research Council has awarded a grant of £1.2m to the University of Warwick, along with the universities of Cambridge, Surrey and West England to establish the “HAT Living Labs”.

The HAT is a platform technology that was created through an earlier Digital Economy Research grant to give individuals the technological power to claim, own, control and share their data the way they want to, to make better and more informed decisions. The management of the HAT ecosystem has recently been handed over to the HAT foundation for a global roll out (see press release here).

The digital world will compel companies to provide us all with highly personalised services which will fit exactly with the ways in which we choose to live our lives in the future. This is the conclusion of Professor Irene Ng, Professor of Marketing and Service Systems in her new article for the University of Warwick’s Knowledge Centre.

Professor Ng, Head of Service Systems and Marketing and Director of WMG’s International Institute for Product and Service Innovation (IIPSI), has released the article on ‘Digital Darwinism’ to coincide with the release of her new book on the subject, Value & Worth: Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy.

It has been announced todaythat leading marketing academic and entrepreneur, Professor Irene Ng, has been appointed as Director of The International Institute for Product and Service Innovation (IIPSI). IIPSI is the newest building for WMG, at the University of Warwick. It is funded by the University of Warwick and the European Regional Development Fund and will translate WMG’s innovation into commercial outcomes within small businesses. This digital innovation space will enable businesses to access the very latest cutting edge product and service design technology, leading to the creation and testing of market leading products and services.

WMG at the University of Warwick have just appointed Professor Irene Ng as Professor of Marketing and Service Systems. Irene was the founder and director of the Centre for Service Research and the Professor of Marketing Science at the University of Exeter’s Business School as well as an ESRC/AIM Services Fellow.