Last week saw the arrival of Kickstarter, the US crowdfunding behemoth to the UK.
As technology becomes increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere people can take for granted the idea they can work with others in the pursuit of a shared outcome But public services need to do more to share knowledge and skills across this emerging space because the dissemination of innovative ideas will support the spread of knowledge and is a good way of sharing skills and expertise.
After the first call for Digital R&D Scotland programme closed, we spent some time analysing the data from each of the 51 applications submitted to Nesta. The complete analytics document can be found on our website here.
This week, while Hurricane Sandy filled many front pages, several were also devoted to the publication of a study on breast cancer screening. It's nice to see a science and evidence story make the front pages for a change, but are we now any clearer on when screening is helpful?
At the Socap conference in San Francisco in early October, over fifteen hundred people gathered to talk about the "intersection of money and meaning". Socap is the biggest gathering of impact investors in the world, and participants who travel to San Francisco from every continent are described as 'pioneers' seeking to "direct the power and efficiency of market systems toward social impact".
A new support programme for start-ups, launched this week, could be moving us one step closer to a world where all our devices are intelligent, connecting and sharing data via the web.
As collaborative technologies facilitate greater involvement from service users in the way public services are commissioned, designed and delivered, so service roles will also change. This inevitably raises questions about professionals and how their roles will evolve.
It was good to see the Economist exploring the idea of public involvement in innovation, with its recent piece on crowdfunding science. But this doesn't go far enough.
News out today suggests that Lord Heseltine's review of industrial strategy will call for foreign takeovers of British businesses to be subject to a "public interest" test.
Nesta's Impact Investment fund went live this week, backed by Nesta's own capital as well as Big Society Capital and Omidyar.
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