Catherine Mulligan

E-mail: Catherine.Mulligan@nottingham.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 115 8232586


Research Interests
I work within the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute, www.horizon.ac.uk

Scaling the Rural Enterprise.
Also I am currently PI on a project investigating the role mobile technologies can play helping rural enterprises achieve economies of scale.

Rural communities are currently uncertain of the appropriate forms of enterprise needed to scale up their endeavours and lack access to the appropriate IT enterprise capabilities to support these. Scaling up is essential if these communities are to obtain higher than subsistence income levels for the materials they produce. For example, many rural enterprises and their associated communities of practice cannot ensure the ability to deliver according to schedule a certain amount of product at a certain quality level. Without achieving sustainable economies of scale and of scope, rural enterprises will not be able to participate fully in the global economy.

Within this project we wish to understand the next generation of rural enterprises that may be enabled by mobile devices in rural settings. First generations rural enterprises have emerged that exploit the timely delivery of information and expertise using mobile devices with considerable success in rural areas. Our focus in this proposal is the establishment of the next generation of enterprise where these mobile devices are used to scale up the activities of a rural enterprise by support the definition and management of enterprise wide processes between distributed members of these rural enterprises.