First round of applications in!

Last Friday saw the close of the first round of applications for the Innovation in Giving Fund - a £10m fund established by the Office for Civil Society and NESTA - to invest in new ideas with the potential to bring about a significant uplift in giving and exchange of time, assets, skills, resources and money to achieve social goals. 

Public services as a platform for giving

Given the current fiscal context, it’s entirely understandable that debates about the future of public services are dominated by how to make fewer financial resources go further – how to get more with less.

Blogging the Challenge

The 17 community organisations involved in our Neighbourhood Challenge programme have posted their first blogs and we’ve awarded some fun prizes for the best ones.

First aid for public services

Like many of the best innovations, first aid training was a simple concept with a powerful impact – equip people with the skills to help out other people.

Do you own a drill?

Apparently the average productive time of a drill in its entire lifetime is about 12-13 minutes.

Systems failure and systems thinking

Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and successive tragic events in children’s services represent the tip of the iceberg of systems failure[1]. Recommendations from subsequent inquiries amount to no more than doing the wrong thing righter, for example improving inspection and accountability, rather than learning how to do the right thing.

Trust and user experience

Part two of Rachel Botsman's blog on building successful Collaborative Consumption platforms. The first blog, Critical mass and scale, can be read here.

Critical mass and scale

Many Collaborative Consumption ideas are pioneering new spaces, and changing users’ behaviour in some shape or form so their biggest initial barrier is typically inertia.

The Finance Innovation Lab: A case study of system innovation in finance

How do you change a system?

This is a question which is almost impossible to answer. 'There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding', as said in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In this case study we're going to tell you all about the dead ends, the mistakes, successes and what we learnt. And here's a picture of what we learnt.

Using RSS to keep track of your web

An efficient way to put yourself at the centre of the flow of information you want to receive is by subscribing to RSS feeds.