Digital innovation
At Leeds University Business School, our research on digital innovation covers a wide range of topics, from platform workers to the metaverse, social media usage to hybrid working, and artificial intelligence to smart cities.
Explore our latest blog posts, podcasts, and reports, or browse our project pages to uncover actionable insights for leveraging digital innovation in your organisation or shaping forward-thinking policy decisions.
Section links
Spotlight blog posts
View all digital innovation blogs here.
Podcast episodes
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Reports and policy briefs
- Policy brief: Pay and conditions in gig work, Professor Chris Forde and colleagues, September 2024. The policy brief draws on a wide range of research evidence to make recommendations for policymakers to improve working conditions in the gig economy. It also considers other precarious and insecure working arrangements, such as zero-hours contracts. The evidence paper is also available, as is a blog post summarising the recommendations.
- Policy brief: Lessons from the four-day week: Reducing working time in the digital transformation of work, Professor Brendan Burchell, Professor David Spencer, Professor Simon Deakin and Professor Jill Rubery, September 2024. This report from the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre details how recent trials of a four-day working week show it can improve wellbeing and productivity, yet current policy rarely considers reduced working time as a strategy to address employment challenges, gender equality, and economic inactivity.
- Employers’ Digital Practices at Work Survey: First Findings, Professor Mark Stuart, Professor Danat Valizade, Dr Felix Schulz, Professor Brendan Burchell, Professor Richard Dickens and Professor Jacqueline O'Reilly, 2023. This report from the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre provides a comprehensive analysis of a nationally representative survey, addressing significant gaps in our understanding of how UK employers adopt and use AI-powered tools and software.
- Policy note: Enabling corporate innovation, Professor Krsto Pandza, 2020. This policy note is based on findings from a research collaboration between Ericsson AB and Professor Krsto Pandza.
Research projects
Digital transformation and strategy
- Digital Futures At Work Research Centre
- Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Katchr
- Knowledge Transfer Partnership with LBBC Group: The transition of digital culture in a UK manufacturing SME business
- Accelerated Knowledge Transfer with LBBC
- Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Clipper Logistics
- Mind the gap: investigating the transfer of digital capabilities from the classroom to the business in SMEs
- Industrial digital technologies for UK SME exporting manufacturers
- A Framework for Digital Strategy Work: Exploring Inclusion and Transparency in the Strategy Process
- Developing corporate innovation capabilities
AI, machine learning and data analysis
- An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Financial Vulnerability
- Understanding the view on data from the C-Suite before, during and after Covid-19
- Understanding the COVID 19 misinformation flow using artificial Intelligence (AI) based tools and citizen panels
- Establishing the feasibility of using machine learning to investigate UK company strategy and performance
- AI-powered sourcing tool for fashion and textile companies to assess environmental and social risks
- Predicting inequality from digital textual data
Digital innovation in industry and society
- Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest
- Scan4Safety at Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust: a longitudinal study 
- Humans in Digital Logistics
- Adopting a Circular Economy Business Model for Resource Efficiency in ICT industry (ACE4ICT)
- Blockchain enabled Cloud Computing based integrated Carbon Calculator (Be4C)
- Gender, digital technology, and the future of work in India
- Transformational Impact of Digital Platforms Ecosystems on Global Value Chains accelerated by COVID-19
- Quality 4.0 and the Future of Assurance
- Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data – a multidisciplinary network between UK and South Korea
- Collaborative decentralised crowd innovation to address complex social problems
Contact us
To find out more about any of the above research, or how you can work with us in these areas, contact research.lubs@leeds.ac.uk.