Google and Microsoft are both making use of personal information, behaviour and searches to enable our own searches to be focused onto ‘friends and people who might know’.
They will need to provide communal workspaces, mentors with specific expertise and with contacts, and expert architects of networking; access to formal learning programmes about aspects of business; support in developing business plans, and practice in pitching; and they will be offering concentrated 'accelerator' programmes for the development of new businesses.
I spent a day last week on teleconferences with a number of charities, trying to help them to articulate a big problem of theirs - which they had agreed to submit to a 'Troubleshooter Day' - to be run by a big telecommunications corporate as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility work.
The Wilson Report on University Collaboration gets down to the specifics: better contacts between universities and business that could help turn ideas into practical benefits. But strong leadership is needed to bring them about.
Jonah Lehrer calls himself a translator - of ideas for people who will turn them into actions
I see the work of Watershed in Bristol as a beacon - always pushing the leading edge of creativity in the arts – and seeking to capture the learnings from which others can benefit.
Many mature economies suffer from seriously antiquated infrastructures, in which they need to invest, acting more collaboratively with business and civil society. But many of the capabilities and skills needed are engrained in those mature economies, and may serve them well in the drive for growth that besets developing and mature economies alike.
Where accelerators (intensive hothouses designed to generate rapid development) focus on innovation-to-market, do they have anything to offer in those sectors of the economy whose innovation times are inherently longer?
Mentoring is fashionable but elusive: for every outstanding example there are probably many faltering relationships.
Astonishingly, the recently published Finnov Report - about finance, innovation and economic growth in Europe - has been virtually ignored by the UK press, and given only a modest formal welcome by politicians.
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