Our 21st century lives will be increasingly connected to our digital identities, representations of ourselves that are defined from trails of personal data and that connect us to commercial and public services, employers, schools, families and friends. The future health of our Digital Economy rests on training a new generation of leaders who can harness the emerging technologies of digital identity for both economic and societal value, but in a fair and transparent manner that accommodates growing public concern over the use of personal data. We will therefore train a community of 80 PhD students with the interdisciplinary skills needed to address the profound challenges of digital identity in the 21st century. Our training programme will equip students with a unique blend of interdisciplinary skills and knowledge across three thematic aspects of digital identity - enabling technologies, global impacts and people and society - while also providing them with the wider research and professional skills to deliver a research project across the intersection of at least two of these. Our students will be situated within Horizon, a leading centre for Digital Economy research and a vibrant environment that draws together a national research Hub, CDT and a network of over 100 industry, academic and international partners. Horizon currently provides access to a large network of over 75 potential supervisors, ranging from from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. Each student will work with an industry, public, third sector or international partner to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, to maximise its impact, and also to enhance their employability. These external partners will be involved in co-sponsorship, supervision, providing resources and hosting internships. Our external partners have already committed to co-sponsor 30 students so far, and we expect this number to grow. Our centre also has a strong international perspective, working with international partners to explore the global marketplace for digital identity services as well as the cross-cultural issues that this raises. This will build on our success in exporting the CDT model to China where we have recently established a £17M International Doctoral Innovation Centre to train 50 international students in digital economy research with funding from Chinese partners. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features a bespoke core covering key topics in digital identity, optional advanced specialist modules, practice-led team and individual projects, training in research methods and professional skills, public and external engagement, and cohort building activities including an annual writing retreat and summer school. The first year features a nine month structured process of PhD co-creation in which students, supervisors and external partners iteratively refine an initial PhD topic into a focused research proposal. Building on our experience of running the current Horizon CDT over the past five years, our management structure responds to external, university and student input and manages students through seven key stages of an extended PhD process: recruitment, induction, taught programme, PhD co-creation, PhD research, thesis, and alumni. Students will be recruited onto and managed through three distinct pathways - industry, international and institutional - that reflect the funding, supervision and visiting constraints of working with varied external partners.

The NEO-DEM project will use non-standard data and novel methods to impact business efficiency, encourage community collaboration and provide scholarly insights into consumer behaviour. UK businesses can struggle in the developing world, despite excellent track records at home. The following reasons explain a good deal of this failure in retail, service and consumer oriented sectors: * It is not possible to directly transfer domestic business models into emerging economies due to cultural, infrastructural and behavioural differences. Companies need to generate new analytical and strategic models that identify the differing needs of customers based on an understanding of the novel behavioural and consumption patterns exhibited. * In the developed world consumer oriented businesses are increasingly data-driven. They rely on cross-referenced geo-demographic, socio-graphic, and psychographic data as well as transactional data (e.g. Tesco & Boots in the UK); their use is enmeshed within company strategy. In many countries this kind of data are incomplete or non-existent, their absence inhibits growth and means that targeting and resource use is sub-optimal. Replicating the kind of data that is readily available in the UK will often be impossible or expensive and impractical. Even when transactional data is forthcoming (e.g. Tesco Clubcard Malaysia) there is limited scope to cross-reference them with reliable geo-demographic data-sets and models that are taken for granted in the UK (e.g. Experian's Mosaic). Despite lagging behind in infrastructural developments, developing countries have experienced digital revolutions; providing a largely untapped opportunity to generate business intelligence. In 2010 of the 5 billion mobile phones in the world 80% were in developing countries and this proportion is continues to grow. African countries have embraced new financial technologies such as mobile payment: over 17m Kenyans use mobile money; around 25% of the country's GNP flows in this way. Crowd sourcing systems such as Ushahidi lead the way in the aggregation of social factors. The project will create a decision support and market segmentation platform generated via personal data, collaborative aggregation and crowd-sourced feedback, that will allow the generation new models of consumer behaviour to support innovation. Our work will hinge on three case studies in exemplar developing economies (Tanzania, Malaysia and China) where we will develop example behavioural segmentations via novel computational and clustering methods and in partnership with a range of data providers and internationally significant companies including: Alliance Boots, Dairy Farm International, Bakhresa Group, Boots, E-fulusi, Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Experian. Academic research into consumer behaviour patterns will be significantly advanced by the techniques developed, their application in this field is novel. There is scope to exploit advanced forms of computation and clustering that more readily account for market complexities. There is a very high chance that the project will provide insights into consumer behaviour that have hitherto remained obscure. So the contribution to research in this area could be both methodological and empirical and contextual (robust insights into developing world consumers are more rare). This expeditionary collaboration is likely to open the door to and on-going conversation between the fields of business/consumer analytics and computational analysis.

Gaps remain in our understanding of how different combinations of business, technology and relationship strategies influence the growth of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), especially in the context of networked interactions by SMEs at regional, extra-regional, and sectoral levels. In each new round of economic and technological development, these strategies evolve, highlighting the importance of tracking in close to real-time the nuances of emerging enterprise strategies. In this project, we will probe differential strategies for SME growth and the role of regional clustering in the growth of innovative companies, building on new and unobtrusive methods of web mining to gain timely information about enterprise developmental pathways. Three key research questions will be addressed: (1) What differentiates the business strategies, technology pathways, and relationships of innovative companies that stay in business and grow? (2) How does regional clustering influence the business strategies, technology pathways, and relationships of innovative companies that stay in business and grow? (3) What are the contributions of policy-induced resources in supporting innovative companies that stay in business and grow? These questions will be probed through a mixed-methods approach using both quantitative and qualitative data. We focus our research on the emerging green goods sector (GGS) - comprising firms producing outputs that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources, with an international comparative element involving the UK, the US, and China. We will identify 300 GGS companies in each country established during the time period 2004-2007, for a total study sample of 900 companies. We will apply a stratified sample selection procedure, to match the distribution of the UK GGS sector by broad product classes with the US and Chinese GGS sectors. We will then combine structured and unstructured data sources to track the origins, business, technology, and relationship strategies, and performance outcomes of these firms through to 2011. Structured data will include corporate databases, corporate patents and publication records. Unstructured data will be derived from new methods of web-scraping and data mining the current and archived web-sites of the sample enterprises. Survival analysis will indicate the pathway of firms from the founding period through to the current period. Hierarchical cluster analysis will be applied to explore differential business strategies by the three countries and by types of metropolitan location and product class. Multivariate regression will relationships between high growth (and other) outcomes and business strategies, technological approach, and the role of regional relationships and policy instruments, controlling for country and other factors. Insights from US and Chinese enterprise growth strategies will be compared with those of UK firms. In the subsequent phase, we will undertake case studies with selected UK enterprises, to test and refine propositions about differential strategies, regional and policy interactions, and outcomes. Interviews (60) will be conducted with high growth firms, stable firms, and other key informants in five UK metropolitan areas. The interviews will examine what differentiates the most successful firms, trace the use and benefit of technology-related and other programmes, and probe for wider policy-related locational attractiveness. The project will be led by the University Manchester in partnership with Experian UK, Georgia Institute of Technology (US), and Beijing Institute of Technology (China). An active dissemination and engagement programme will be pursued with the academic and non-academic worlds, including mechanisms for advanced training and outreach to users in the business sector, including start-up firms and business support programmes, to university and other technology transfer managers, and to local and national policymakers.

Horizon will tackle the challenge of harnessing the power of ubiquitous computing for the digital economy in a way that is acceptable to our society and increases the quality of life for all. This will involve establishing a world-leading and sustainable centre of excellence for research and knowledge transfer for the ubiquitous digital economy. Horizon will conduct a five-year programme of research into the key scientific challenges involved in the widespread adoption of ubiquitous computing; collaborate with users to create, demonstrate and study next generation services; deliver a knowledge transfer programme that ensures that the results of our research are fully connected to the digital economy; train a new generation of researchers to meet the demands of industry for skilled interdisciplinary staff; engage with policy makers and the wider public in order to address societal concerns; and provide a focal point for international, national and regional research in this area.Horizon will exploit the distinctive nature of hub funding to develop a unique approach to this challenge. Our Collaborative Research Programme will be driven by the overarching concept of a lifelong contextual footprint, the idea that each of us throughout our lifetimes will lay down a digital trail that captures our patterns of interaction with digital services. Our research will explore the major infrastructural, human and business challenges associated with this concept, adopting a unique multidisciplinary approach that integrates insights from computer science, psychology, sociology, business, economics and the arts and humanities. We will collaborate with over 30 users from different sectors of the Digital Economy in order to create, deploy and study a series of next generation services 'in the wild' so as to drive our underlying research. We will initially focus on the creative industries and transportation sectors, but subsequently extend our focus to additional sectors in partnership with other hubs and major initiatives. In parallel, our Transformation Programme will drive knowledge transfer and long-term economic impact through partnership management, public engagement, international outreach, incubation of new ventures, the transfer of people, and training for 24 associated PhD students, funded by the University.Our team draws on leading groups at Nottingham spanning computer science, engineering, business, psychology and sociology, complemented by expertise at two spokes: distributed systems and communications at Cambridge, and mathematical modelling and advertising at Reading. A series of further mini-spokes will enable us to introduce other key individuals through hub fellowships.These multiple disciplines and partners will be brought together in a new centre at Nottingham where they will be able to engage with a critical-mass cohort of research staff and students to explore innovative and challenging new projects. The Hub will be directed by Professor Derek McAuley who brings extensive experience of working in academia, directing major industrial research laboratories, and also launching spin-out companies. He will be supported by Professor Tom Rodden, an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow who previously directed the Equator IRC. The net result will be a unique partnership between EPSRC, industry, the public, and the University, with the latter committing 16M of its own funds to match the 12M requested from EPSRC.

We will train a cohort of 65 PhD students to tackle the challenge of Data Creativity for the 21st century digital economy. In partnership with over 40 industry and academic partners, our students will establish the technologies and methods to enable producers and consumers to co-create smarter products in smarter ways and so establish trust in the use of personal data. Data is widely recognised by industry as being the 'fuel' that powers the economy. However, the highly personal nature of much data has raised concerns about privacy and ownership that threaten to undermine consumers' trust. Unlocking the economic potential of personal data while tackling societal concerns demands a new approach that balances the ability to innovate new products with building trust and ensuring compliance with a complex regulatory framework. This requires PhD students with a deep appreciation of the capabilities of emerging technology, the ability to innovate new products, but also an understanding of how this can be done in a responsible way. Our approach to this challenge is one of Data Creativity - enabling people to take control of their data and exercise greater agency by becoming creative consumers who actively co-create more trusted products. Driven by the needs of industry, public sector and third sector partners who have so far committed £1.6M of direct and £2.8M of in kind funding, we will explore multiple sectors including Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Food; Creative Industries; Health and Wellbeing; Personal Finance; and Smart Mobility and how it can unlock synergies between these. Our partners also represent interests in enabling technologies and the cross cutting concerns of privacy and security. Each student will work with industry, public, third sector or international partners to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, maximising its impact while also enhancing their future employability. External partners will be involved in PhD co-design, supervision, training, providing resources, hosting placements, setting industry-led challenge projects and steering. Addressing the challenges of Data Creativity demands a multi-disciplinary approach that combines expertise in technology development and human-centred methods with domain expertise across key sectors of the economy. Our students will be situated within Horizon, a leading centre for Digital Economy research and a vibrant environment that draws together a national research Hub, CDT and a network of over 100 industry, academic and international partners. We currently provide access to a network of >80 potential supervisors, ranging from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. This extends to academic partners at other Universities who will be involved in co-hosting and supervising our students, including the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features: a bespoke core covering key topics in Future Products, Enabling Technologies, Innovation and Responsibility; optional advanced specialist modules; internship and international exchanges; industry-led challenge projects; training in research methods and professional skills; modules dedicated to the PhD proposal, planning and write up; and many opportunities for cross-cohort collaboration including our annual industry conference, retreat and summer schools. Our Impact Fund supports students in deepening the impact of their research. Horizon has EDI considerations embedded throughout, from consideration of equal opportunities in recruitment to ensuring that we deliver an inclusive environment which supports diversity of needs and backgrounds in the student experience.