Geoff Mulgan - 31.08.2011
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.
A good example are the GPs and other NHS practitioners we'll be working with in six areas on People Powered Health. The whole question of co-production in health (which is what this programme focuses on) is enormously important but also enormously difficult. For decades there's been a widespread recognition that in the future, healthcare will increasingly be about managing your own condition or working with other patients to manage it, rather than being fixed by doctors or hospitals as a passive patient. But the NHS, like other healthcare systems around the world, has struggled to embed these models in everyday work. Hopefully these six places will show just what can be done - and demonstrate models that can then be widely spread.
Over the last few weeks we've been getting in touch with our NESTA alumni - the people that have received support via programmes such as Creative Pioneers. It's inspiring to come across the extraordinary range of things they've done. We're hoping to bring them together for various events over the next year and showcase more of their work on our website. If you know of anyone in this group that hasn't been reached then please do let us know.
Whilst I was away I was lucky enough to spend some time with an extraordinarily innovative man called Girish Muzumdar. He's been working for many years on a comprehensive language made up of pictograms rather than text. He's found that these are more effective in teaching literacy to children with learning disabilities or as a fast track to a new language for migrants. He's also using them to reshape signs in cities and buildings, and to provide much easier guidance on everything from navigating around a city to learning a new skill. Computers and the internet have already had a huge impact on our visual imagination, and most of us are now used to pictographic messages. But Girish's work is taking this a stage further and by doing so opening up fascinating new possibilities.
I've long been interested in the practical tools that help people to be creative and innovative. Sometimes innovation is talked about in terms of out of the box ideas and rare genius. But when you look at any innovations in detail they turn out to have been much more incremental, and tend to draw on a fairly consistent set of ways of thinking. A couple of years ago I tried to write some of these down and have subsequently used them with very different groups, from communities to nurses and teachers, businesses and technologists - particularly to help with service or social innovations. They help people quickly get to more radical ideas - and remove at least some of the mystery from innovation. In this video I talk about them in a little more detail. I'd be keen for any feedback for any additional ones which should be added here or alternative ways of framing this.
August saw the sale of Autonomy, a company founded by NESTA Trustee Mike Lynch. It's not every day that a British company is sold for $10billion and it leaves us all with the question of how the UK could do better in creating truly successful new firms. Autonomy is not wholly unique: but it is very rare. As we deepen NESTA's work on innovation systems this is likely to be one of the key questions: how best to bring together the right mix of money, talent, and above all staying power, to build great organisations?
Finally, the last few weeks have seen riots in many parts of England and Wales. The likelihood of unrest has been a dominant topic of conversation for the last 18 months or so amongst the police and local authorities, though it seemed to come as a surprise to the media. The roots of this kind of unrest are complex - a mix of underlying conditions and the specifics of events and tactics - though some of the commentary brings to mind HR Mencken's famous comment that 'to every complex problem there is a simple solution - and it's wrong'. However one project that I've had involvement in may hold some of the answers to preventing similar future unrest breaking out again. UpRising was set up to help areas where there weren't routes into power for young people - partly drawing on lessons from the riots of the early 2000s. It's had backing from all the main party leaders, as well as hundreds of supporters, coaches and mentors from across politics, business, media and the third sector. This year they've been trying to target areas at most risk of unrest. Hopefully the events of the last few weeks will prompt some more creativity and imagination on the ground, rather than just hand-wringing.
On a lighter note, I have been catching up on culture - highlights were at last getting round to reading Nabokov's autobiography 'Speak, Memory', a book with probably the most boring title ever - the gripping novel 'New Finnish Grammar', and the amazing 'London Road' at the National Theatre: a sort-of musical based around the Ipswich murders of a few years ago that managed to be wholly original, funny, sad and inspiring, and a rare example of the rhythms of everyday speech finding their way into music.
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07 Sep 11, 11:32am (2 yearss ago)
Connecting, commenting and making sense
Thanks for a blog that looks as if it is going to add another layer of value to NESTA's work by relating that to current events, highlighting developments, and connecting them to other work. The opinion-news-inspiration mix is difficult one, and readers will of course have different priorities. I really appreciate embedded links to save Googling - thanks. More please!
eddiemckinnon
06 Sep 11, 5:15pm (2 yearss ago)
'riot blindness'
Hello Geoff Enjoying your blog and wanted to respond briefly to the point you made about how the riots were such ‘a surprise to the media’. I heard a police officer being interviewed on the Today programme one morning a few weeks ago. I think he was Peter Barnett, president of the Police Superintendents Association. He pointed out that at the Association’s annual conference last year, and in the presence of ministers, presentations and discussions featured the fears of those present that it was only a matter of time before civil unrest occurred due to the worsening economic circumstances and their impacts on communities, especially disadvantaged ones, that this had been seen in other industrialised nations and the notion that ‘it couldn’t happen here’ was naive. He said their warnings were treated as “scaremongering” and dismissed with disdain. Sadly ‘riot blindness’ was not , and is not, confined to some journalists and broadcasters – it also afflicts the politicians who need to listen closely to the very professionals (e.g. police, teachers, workers at all levels of what remains of health and social services) who work with the fallout of their socially, not to mention economically, bankrupt policies. But I don’t think that they are the least bit interested in genuinely listening. The current Private Eye has a small column which features recent comments from David Cameron about the riots and how the causes (and therefore the solutions) are all ‘clear and simple’ – as we know, David is well-schooled in the arts of public relations and marketing. I know you will be familiar with Oscar Wilde’s saw ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’ – but if you can convince people that it is, then you don’t need to address the real complexities which cause people to take to the streets and engage in violence and looting. Instead get the knees jerking, demonise and scapegoat the already vulnerable and powerless and get on with dividing and ruling as per. As Rabbie Burns said ‘Such a parcel of rogues in a nation’.