P&L, cash flow forecast, business plan, interest creating statements, sales, business development. You'd be forgiven for thinking that I'm about to launch into a long post about the jargon associated with business start-ups. In fact I'm reflecting on the new world that Third Sector organisations are having to adapt to in order to survive.
There's no easy way of saying this. This is a blog post about government procurement and how it can encourage innovation.
I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at the Paradiso Conference in Brussels on the subject of collective intelligence. It's a topic that's going to be an important one for NESTA over the next year or two (we'll soon be publishing an overview paper on concepts, theories and uses of CI).
How do we find new ways to keep people in their 50s and 60s active and valued members of their local community, so that ageing becomes a positive experience?
Sir John Vickers's Independent Commission on Banking raises interesting questions on what banking reform means for innovative businesses, and vice versa.
I'm spending quite a bit of my time at the moment catching up with NESTA projects around the country and talking to people about what we should do in the future.
Anyone with a pulse and an interest in innovative business should read Luke Johnson’s FT column. You can rely on it for a challenging, entrepreneurial take on the economy.
Yesterday we launched a new fund to support innovation in giving. It's funded by the Cabinet Office and will back ideas with the potential to achieve a big impact on how people give time, share time or give money. The sums are quite big - £10m over two years - and I'm hoping we'll get some really imaginative ideas.
I'm back after my first NESTA blog and trying to make sense of riots, wobbling financial markets and the endgame in Libya. We're in the lucky position of being able to collaborate with innovators who tend by their nature to be optimists regardless of what's happening around them.
Tim Harford, in his (wonderful) new book puts it very sharply - any solution to climate change "is going to come either because individuals voluntarily change their behaviour, or because governments change the rules."[1]
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