Healthcare is an area where the opportunities for data to transform the sector have perhaps been overhyped, but few people doubt that the industry will be transformed by data.
Part two of Rachel Botsman's blog on building successful Collaborative Consumption platforms. The first blog, Critical mass and scale, can be read here.
I am sure we all have experience of news articles telling us that there is a new bit of technology guaranteed to make our lives in to some kind of Utopian existence. The new gadget to save you time, the new home appliance to halve the amount of work you need to do. And yet, technology is also sometimes thought of as a nuisance, something that interferes rather than helps.
Jean-Marc Ayrault has just been appointed France’s Prime Minister. He’s also Mayor of Nantes, where he is involved in one of Europe’s most interesting and radical experiments, and one of the sadly rare examples of a financial innovation that might create value for the public rather than destroying it.
You might have thought that learning about information technology in schools would be exciting and infinitely motivating. After all, teenagers find it hard to tear themselves away from games and social media. Left to their own devices, they have no difficulty creating new characters, stories and home movies.
Any discussion on innovation in the public sector soon turns to the problem of risk. Surely public services are simply too risk averse to take big risks? And anyway shouldn’t we want them to avoid risks with things like traffic light systems or nuclear safety?
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.
I spent a day last week on teleconferences with a number of charities, trying to help them to articulate a big problem of theirs - which they had agreed to submit to a 'Troubleshooter Day' - to be run by a big telecommunications corporate as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility work.
Big Data is a great buzzword - but how many are really innovating with data - and what's stopping those who aren't?
Interest in the role of external economies and spill over effects as an influence on regional and local growth has grown remarkably in recent years.
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