19.06.2012
Last week we argued for a NICE for social policy to be developed. Today Government announces plans to open up policy from outside Whitehall to help find “what works”, involving exploring the creation of new evidence centres.
As Scotland gears up for its annual swell of visitors during the festival season; the world also awaits the summer release of Disney/Pixar's latest 3D animated film, Brave. Set in medieval Scotland, Brave features a fiery red-headed heroine, tons of tartan and highland scenery galore.
Or: How do you find the low-hanging fruit in an invisible orchard?
In a previous blog post I set out five challenges to the movement to get more children coding, making apps, hacking websites and so on.
As part of a project planning process it's often an effective technique to employ Gary Klein's idea of a pre-mortem exercise - something that Kahneman in his wonderful book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' describes as "the best idea"[1] for taming unfounded optimism.
A striking characteristic of many round 1 innovations is the effort put into getting the mechanics of giving right - that's to say how to successfully tap into giving motivations, 'onboard' users in large numbers and make the process of giving simple and efficient.
A few years ago, I and others started promoting the idea of creating a NICE for areas of public policy. NICE is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and is a unique institution that publicly rules on what works in healthcare - and what's cost effective.
Given Nesta's remit, I'm keen to make sure that I keep the focus of our Big Data work on innovation. But what does using data for innovation mean? What does it rule out?
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