We've announced the first 15 organisations to be funded through the Innovation in Giving Fund.
Making the transition towards environmental sustainability should be positioned as making a transition to a better life.
This week (12 September 2012) Nesta held the first of its UK road show events in Scotland and I reflected on what I had heard and learned from the day. If you missed it, you can watch the day here. Thanks to the many organisations and people who turned out to support the event- we try and bring together the 'unusual suspects' to work together to support innovation and this is reflected in the day.
Nesta has just announced four projects that we will be funding through our Make it Local Scotland programme, helping councils open their data and work with a software developer in order to develop entirely new, web-based public services. We will be working with five local authorities in Scotland, spanning Scotland’s largest cities as well as rural areas - including an island at (nearly) the most northerly tip of the UK.
This weekend the Financial Times reported on the rise in private sector jobs in some of the regions of the North of England and the Midlands hardest hit by the financial crisis.
A new support programme for start-ups, launched this week, could be moving us one step closer to a world where all our devices are intelligent, connecting and sharing data via the web.
What is holding back innovation in the current system and where are the gaps? The 'Open Book of Social Innovation' describes six stages of innovation that take ideas from inception to impact.
In June 2010, the new Government announced its intention to overhaul and further streamline the employment, welfare and benefit systems.
There is a lot of evidence on the extent of innovation in labour market programmes prior to the coalition governments' launch of the Work Programme. The Labour Government began 13 years of wide-scale experimentation in labour market programme design with the launch of the New Deal programmes in 1997, focused on lone parents, young people, disabled people and long-term unemployed people. These were followed by a plethora of pilots to develop and test innovative ideas.
Worklessness may not seem an obvious area of interest for Nesta, which like most innovation agencies has tended to focus in the past on technologies or topics like education.
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