In June 2010, the new Government announced its intention to overhaul and further streamline the employment, welfare and benefit systems.
This week I read some very thoughtful comments on prizes in a blog post on The Guardian website by Rebekah Higgitt of the National Maritime Museum.
The tough social problems we have focussed on through Reboot Britain have often defied solutions for significant periods of time. When coupled with the fact innovators are experimenting with untested tools, this means development processes must be agile and able to evolve in the face of extreme uncertainty if they are to be successful.
Last week we were at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon for the launch of the EU Social Innovation Prize Competition in memory of Diogo Vasconcelos. Diogo was described as a person of outstanding energy and charisma. He never stopped thinking ahead, developing and connecting ideas and engaging with new people.
The other day a very talented and committed member of my team suddenly looked very worried and asked me:
'What if we're wrong?'
'What do you mean?' I replied.
'What if we're wrong about digital technology and education? What if it doesn't make any difference? There's no evidence from previous trials that technology makes any difference to attainment. What if we're wasting money?'
A university illustrates the radical shift in the objectives to which enterprise is being put: it dedicates itself entirely to social enterprise.
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.
People rightly expect to receive accessible, high quality public services that they get choice and control over, but they have an increasingly important role to play if these demands are to be met in the future. This will only happen if public services can organise people and provide services in a way that leads to outputs that are empowering, coherent and offer lasting value. But how can public services make it easier for people to meet their own and other people's needs?
I spent two days this week at Strata, the Big Data conference that's been run for the last 18 months or so by O'Reilly, and that was held for the first time outside the United States this week.
Defining the term collaborative technology is difficult. Often when we talk about collaborative technology, or for that matter social media or web 2.0, people naturally think about popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, You Tube or Wikipedia.
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