A few years ago, I and others started promoting the idea of creating a NICE for areas of public policy. NICE is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and is a unique institution that publicly rules on what works in healthcare - and what's cost effective.
Jean-Marc Ayrault has just been appointed France’s Prime Minister. He’s also Mayor of Nantes, where he is involved in one of Europe’s most interesting and radical experiments, and one of the sadly rare examples of a financial innovation that might create value for the public rather than destroying it.
You might have thought that learning about information technology in schools would be exciting and infinitely motivating. After all, teenagers find it hard to tear themselves away from games and social media. Left to their own devices, they have no difficulty creating new characters, stories and home movies.
Any discussion on innovation in the public sector soon turns to the problem of risk. Surely public services are simply too risk averse to take big risks? And anyway shouldn’t we want them to avoid risks with things like traffic light systems or nuclear safety?
Eighteen months ago I was asked to give a talk on the outlook for the coalition at the Carlton Club, one of the high temples of British Conservatism. I came across my notes this week, which provided a reminder of just how quickly political moods can change.
I spent a few days last week in Canada, working with some of our partner organisations in technology, business and social innovation.
Yesterday we launched the new Centre for Challenge Prizes, with the Minister David Willetts, Jason Crusan from NASA and Cristin Dorgelo from the White House. This is an exciting and ambitious initiative which we hope will inject some creative energy into problem solving.
There is huge interest around the world in new tools for speeding up the generation and development of ideas. Many of them are in use in and around Nesta, including crowdsourcing, design methods and collaboration platforms of all kinds.
Nesta hosted a great event last month on Collaborative Consumption, kicked off by the marvellous Rachel Botsman.
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