LSe-lab

and
innovateUK
(Cap Gemini Ernst & Young)
invite you to participate in a brainstorming workshop

Date: 9 May 2003

Time: 9 am to 6 pm
(Breakfast from 8:30)
Venue: innovateUK, 5th Floor, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young,
76-88 Wardour Street, London

Theme:

New Rhythms for Innovative Products and Services

Members of the LSe-lab and innovateUK, a division of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young
(CGE&Y) have been exploring possible synergies and collaboration. A major issue is how
the LSE can design a physical and intellectual space – the LSe-lab – that provides mutual
benefit to LSE scholars and to innovateUK staff. CGE&Y has been developing and installing
‘Accelerated Solutions Environments’ (ASEs) in their Innovation Centres worldwide. We
think we can use the innovateUK ASE in an interesting way to push forward the development
of the LSe-Lab.

An ASE offers, in a flexible, integrated and creative way:

ÿ Real and virtual learning environments and processes;
ÿ Solutions that enable teams to rapidly generate options.

An ASE is:
ÿ A physical space as well as an intellectual and supportive environment; a production
studio and a hub in a network;
ÿ A unique combination of process, environment, methods and technologies designed
to foster creative thinking and collaboration.

Can we use this space to increase the permeability between business innovation and problem-
solving and our academic interests? Can we reverse the standard paradigm whereby scholarly
activity and ways of working operate according to a rhythm that differs from that of
innovation in business?

The aim of the workshop, which will take place in the ASE at innovateUK, is to bring
interested LSE staff and students together with innovateUK staff to initiate a process and a
development that may lead ultimately to a cross-disciplinary LSe-lab environment. Such an
environment would need to generate products and services, both intellectual and commercial,
and real and virtual, that are mutually beneficial to scholars, business innovators and others.
innovateUK will facilitate the workshop. Claudio Ciborra, Patrick Dunleavy, Patrick
Humphreys, Florian Lennert, Robin Mansell, Danny Quah, and Roger Silverstone from LSE
have agreed to participate. We hope you will join us to explore whether there are shared
rhythms and interests in all our respective endeavours.

We want to brainstorm key themes, topics and practices that could attract the financing
necessary to launch the LSe-lab as a going-concern that houses research fellows and projects,
and develops products and services that interest us all.

We would like you to join with us in this workshop, as we believe that your participation is
essential in giving shape to the next steps towards the creation of the LSe-lab.

Please RSVP to: Kathy Moir, k.moir@lse.ac.uk; 020 7955 7195

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THE
LSe-lab
-
A LABORATORY FOR THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

Intertwined processes of technical and social change entail great uncertainty. They involve
continuous challenges for the management of everyday life at the start of the 21st century.
The last years of the previous century initiated a technologically stimulated and fundamental
challenge to the ways of life of large populations in the industrialised world. Nearly all facets
of their communicative interactions with local and distant others are becoming increasingly
and intensely affected by information and communication technologies and their information
content.

It is clear that individual and collective experiences will vary over time in relation to
technological change and their own life-cycle, and in relation to the dynamics of the longer
durées of social change. The LSe-lab will generate original perspectives on the way people
experience the uncertainties, risks and challenges that are associated with these technologies,
and on the strategies needed to engage with those experiences.

If we are to begin to understand the ethical, social, cultural, economic and political
consequences of technologically mediated interaction, it is essential that we develop new
theories, new methodologies and practical solutions to enhance both thinking and action in
our relationships to the complexities of personal and institutional life in the 21st century.

We, in the LSe-lab, believe that the face-off between the social, the economic, the political
and technical design is the crucial one if we are to make sense of and better manage the
present and the future of our new knowledge societies. This is not a centre of research on
technology, if by technology we mean the machine or even the code. LSe-lab proposes to
think of technology as a bundle of skills, structures, experiences and contexts. Therefore, it
will provide the forum to ask the big questions from a unique perspective. What are these
big questions?

How do we mobilise interdisciplinary research to tackle convergence and uncertainty?

How do we create the tools and learning strategies to develop the necessary new literacies?

How do we foster wealth and value creation globally and locally in the new economy?

What new ethical dilemmas are posed by the increasing intrusion of new technologies into
our markets, our politics and our everyday life?

How are the innovative features of the new technologies being contested; how can they be
best managed?

How do we adjust future hopes to present and past experiences?

How do we navigate between scepticism and creativity?

Approaching the complexity and novelty of the knowledge society will involve a number of
different, but overlapping interdisciplinary approaches. For example, with respect to the
economy, advanced digital technologies are associated with spontaneously emergent
experimental methods of organising the production and dissemination of information, giving

3
rise to new institutions, market relationships and legal practices. Or, in the embryonic world
of e-government, the opportunities offered by new technologies, normally seen as mere
artefacts, create substantial challenges for governance, communication and organisational
change. Within organisations, the new technologies give rise to new sources of risk and the
potential for dysfunction, as well as to creativity, as new applications are introduced. And,
finally, within society and community new information and communication technologies
become both tools and troubles, as citizens and consumers seek to manage and increase the
quality of their own everyday lives.

The LSe-lab ambition

We intend to offer a crucible for research and dialogue on these major issues and questions,
drawing on and extending LSE’s world-class expertise in the social science of technical
innovation and social transformation, and its consequences.

The LSe-lab will:

• offer a virtual and real-world laboratory for intellectual innovation and future thinking;
• foster a network of researchers, designers, entrepreneurs and policy-makers all of whom
contribute to leading edge developments in digital technologies and services;
• promote links between government and civil society through innovative applications of
information and communication technologies;
• document and disseminate the products of the on-going dialogues among LSe-lab
participants;
• provide a rigorous and independent space for the generation of research outputs, both
theoretical and applied;
• create an on-line ‘living’ resource of evidence-based commentary and research results on
the knowledge society.

Who are we?

The LSe-lab offers an innovative interdisciplinary intellectual approach based on a unique

collaboration between the LSE’s Departments of Economics, Government, Information
Systems, Media and Communications and Social Psychology. It is directed by Professor
Robin Mansell with input from Professors Claudio Ciborra, Patrick Dunleavy, Patrick
Humphreys and Danny Quah, as well as Florian Lennert, LSE’s Director of Corporate
Relations and more than 40 other researchers across the School.