I recently made my first proper visit to Brazil, visiting Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasilia, and meeting a wide range of people, from banks and innovation agencies, to universities, accelerators, startups, civil society groups, arts collectives and government ministries.
Cooking has become like Hollywood or Rock music, with global stars and fans.
We've been doing a fair amount of work on collective intelligence. It's one of the most fascinating fields of investigation today, looking at what makes groups smart, how to collaborate and how technologies can help us think.
This week the government launched its new 'What Works' centres at an event hosted by Nesta. As one of the ministers there commented, the remarkable thing is not that it's happening but that it hasn't happened before: you might have thought that government would want to know what works.
Here's a moral tale which tells us how far we are from being a knowledge society - even though we're surrounded by ever smarter technologies.
My view of the Knowledge Society is the same as Gandhi's view of western civilisation: that it would be a good idea.
We held an interesting session last week on evidence around home-based care for older people.
Late last year I attended a fascinating session on Opening Government, pulled together by Beth Noveck with the MacArthur Foundation - and involving luminaries like Sandy Pentland, Yochai Benkler and Duncan Watts.
The Makers Movement is continuing to gather momentum. Its essential idea is that making things and manufacturing can be democratised with the help of a new generation of technologies, notably 3D printers. There's a message that we are more in touch with our world if we make parts of it rather than just being passive consumers. The movement is helpfully reconnecting craft to high technology.
We hosted the Digital R&D Forum in Manchester yesterday with 300 people in attendance, and with introductory speeches from our partners, Alan Davey from the Arts Council and Rick Rylance from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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