Boffin Enterprises

Boffin Enterprises: a portfolio business

Boffin Enterprises is the overall trading name for a portfolio of businesses created around the academic and research interests of Dr Rebecca M. Ellis. Rebecca has worked for over a decade in research and higher education at both the University of Essex (Chimera: Institute of Social and Technical Research and the Department of Sociology) and City College Norwich, an associate college of the University of East Anglia. During that decade, Rebecca was involved in many cutting edge research projects in the area of society and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for a variety of large corporate and academic clients including British Telecom, Eurescom, Kodak, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Norwegian Research Council and HEFCE. She is best known for her ESRC research on eBay, which received considerable media attention from BBC London News, BBC Look East, the BBC World Service, the Times Higher Education Supplement and Australian Vogue, amongst others.

Boffin Enterprises Begins Trading in Summer 2011

Rebecca set up Boffin Enterprises in the summer of 2011, deciding to go freelance and set up as a small business. Having researched small businesses over the course of many years for BT and the Norwegian Research Council and seen the benefits of self employment, she decided that going freelance would enable her to have more flexibility in subject area and the balance between research and tuition than under the strictures of university employment. The name 'Boffin Enterprises' was chosen to denote the origin of the businesses in the world of research science and analysis. The word 'boffin' is also said to have been the name of an East Anglian restaurant during the Second World War where research scientists developed radar (Wikipedia, N.D.). As Norfolk was her home county and with undertaking research in East Anglia for all her working life so far, the name seemed appropriate. Boffin Enterprises is comprised of three businesses: Aspire Higher Tuition, Digital Era Research and various e-commerce ventures based around selling Art Deco and vintage style goods and collectibles. These are explained in more detail below.

Aspire Higher Tuition

During her time teaching undergraduate sociology and completing her two-year Postgraduate Certificate of Higher Education Practice (PGCHEP) teaching qualification, Rebecca identified that there was a student need for further personal tuition at university level than could often be provided within universities themselves. Following the theory of 'situated learning' (Lave and Wenger, 1991), it became apparent that students needed more of an 'apprenticeship' and further tuition in the taken-for-grantedness of higher education practices - including understanding how they had been graded, essay techniques and the skills of academic argument. Lave and Wenger propose a theory of situated learning where learning: “is an integral part of a generative social practice in the lived-in world” (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 35) and “the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community” (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 29). In essence, this concerns the process by which newcomers or ‘apprentices’ engage with and become a part of a community of practice which consists of other apprentices, ‘young masters’ and masters. They state that by transparency, the inner workings of the process, should be open to the learner’s inspection. Aspire Higher Tuition offers personal tuition and mentoring for students of the social sciences and aims to open up the inner workings of the process.

DIGITAL ERA RESEARCH

Digital Era Research was set up as a business which could enable Rebecca and her associates to carry out research in their respective areas of expertise. This principally involved the social use of ICTs and encompassed a wide variety of areas from micro-ethnographies of small business groups using technology in their everyday lives to e-learning and smart homes. The name 'Digital Era Research' was inspired from the widest appreciation of how 'the digital' has changed many people's lives and their everyday experiences - from mobile phones, computers and the Internet, to digital photography and digital TV. Digital Era Research is interested in the complex and mutually constitutive relationships between online and offline worlds, which is represented by the business's logo.

decoandvintage.co.uk

Rebecca is currently in the process of setting up her own e-commerce site, eBay and Amazon shops in order to sell original vintage and Deco pieces as well as high quality Deco-inspired items. She is intending to utilise the e-commerce expertise gained during her two year ESRC project on eBay.