Designing Power Networks: Exploring Advantageous Governance and Organization Structures

Institution: University of Manchester

Dept/School/Faculty: EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Power Networks

PhD Supervisor: Prof N Gil

Application Deadline: Applications accepted all year round

Funding Availability: Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)

Student background required: 

We are looking for a student with excellent analytical and communications skills, driven, entrepreneur, advanced command of the English language; interest in complex business ecosystems and design 

Benefit to / Impact on Industry: 
This study aims to further our understanding as to the forms of governance and organizing that can be created to design power networks, and the implications of different forms to the performance of projects to develop new power networks 
What novelty will the student base their PhD on? The student will contribute to a contemporaneous conversation about how collective action arenas, or pluralistic organizations, that bring together various legally independent actors including governments, public agencies and profit-seekers, and therefore establish a de facto a distributed community of production that operates under a ‘flat’ governance structure, can collaborate so as to co-develop large-scale designed artefacts with limited decomposability 

Project overview: 
The aim of this research project is to further our understanding as to how democratic societies produce power networks, and whether there are particular organizational and governance structures producing superior results, assuming we can unambiguously define performance. This is a fundamental research question that has potential to help us further our understanding of the link between structure and performance in the context of public-private partnerships created to produce infrastructure. Crucially, these partnerships are instrumental to succeed in meeting major societal challenges ranging from poverty relief, climate change, population growth, energy crisis, scarcity of potable water, rises of sea water levels, and migration to cities. More broadly, these partnerships are empirical realizations of distributed communities of production known to be central to understand the development of new business ecosystems (social networks like Facebook and Linkedin, open source communities), new scientific breakthroughs, and broadly the development of large infrastructure assets. To achieve their superordinate goals, these interorganizational collaborations must unify partners who belong to different communities of practice, and thus overcome acute epistemic gaps and resolve differences in beliefs, interests, and priorities. 

Outline of Proposed Project Plan: 
Year 1: The student will follow the Manchester Business School PhD program, and pick technical electives to gain domain knowledge in power networks; research proposal will be developed 
Year 2: fieldwork with organizations involved in the design of power networks (end-users, customers, main producers, public agencies, regulators, complementors) will be expected. 
Years 3 and 4: will be mostly focused on analysing the data and developing arguments as to which governance and organization structures can be more advantageous to develop power networks, and thus trace the performance of development projects back to organization and governance structure. 

Funding Notes:

This project is funded by EPSRC, the University of Manchester and our Industry partners. Funding is available to UK candidates. EU candidates are also eligible if they have been studying or working continuously in the UK for three or more years (prior to the start date of the programme). The successful candidates will have their fees paid in full and will receive an enhanced maintenance stipend. 

See here for information on how to apply and entry requirements: www.power-networks-cdt.manchester.ac.uk/study/projects-apply