Robert Mellor

Biography

"I hold separate earned doctorates in various academic disciplines including computing and biology and furthermore am author of ~80 scientific publications in reputable journals, including e.g. ""Nature"", plus I have written ten textbooks of which four are on programming and four on innovation and entrepreneurship. I am happy to say that 3 of my books have appeared in foreign translations. My impact factor (h-Index) is between 23 (Google) and 31 (ResearchGate). I have been recipient, investigator and co-investigator of research grants from the European Union, EMBO, British Council, Swiss National Science Foundation, the German National Science Foundation, the German Ministry of Research and Technology, the Danish National Science Council and several other bodies. My solo applications amount to ~2 million Euro. I have successfully supervised 22 research students, and presently supervise another 3 PhDs. I have won a number of international prizes for my works, I am an active consultant with over twelve years industrial experience and I have been expert adviser to several national governments at ministerial level, and to the European Union, since 1994. I am top-level DBS certified and spend some of my free time in schools as a STEM-Net Ambassador (www.stemnet.org.uk) I welcome inquires from potential PhD students interested in the areas of knowledge management and the computer modelling of business processes. "

Research Interest

"Life would be much easier if organisations had a 3D map of the business landscape showing owners and entrepreneurs where best to go, how much they could benefit when they get there, as well as how much it would cost them along the way. Just as astronomers find out about our Universe by looking at lots of stars, and in different wavelengths, we are looking at lots of organisations and using metrics that are different to the ones that are normally visible. To do this we need to have a lot of information, this is called a ""Big Data"" approach. Unfortunately the metrics that are available in the UK, like company annual returns, don't tell us a lot. Indeed our previous research indicates that some important factors can be quite basic e.g. the number of employees each year within an organisation, and these figures are simply not collected centrally in the UK. Thus we have teamed up with international partners to obtain Big Data. Feeding this information into the computer model that we have developed in the UK, we can produce not only a user friendly and very practical 3D map of the ""Business Universe"", but also academically to reveal hidden insights into how humans cluster in organisations and indeed how clusters cluster. This approach is very relevant not only to consultants, owners, entrepreneurs and academics, but also to everyone who has a job. Our present research involves; (1) How do economic laws determine the shape of organisations (2) When organisations cluster in e.g. tech hubs or science parks, what is the best way of them to organise their structure and (3) create a computer model for business clusters feasibility, what metric(s) can be used to stipulate the distance between clusters and how do age, size and stage in the maturity cycle affect this distance?"