The search is on for more potentially game-changing innovations in giving. This week (29 May) we launched the second open call for ideas for the Innovations in Giving Fund.
Here’s an experiment. Turn to the person next to you and ask them to name an organisation delivering a cutting edge innovation.
This is the second in a series of blogs summarising discussions about the role and design of challenge prizes at our Centre for Challenge Prizes launch (the first blog can be read here). We were lucky enough to bring together some brilliant individuals and organisations from a range of sectors, which generated some useful and interesting discussion, so we wanted to share some of the key points.
They will need to provide communal workspaces, mentors with specific expertise and with contacts, and expert architects of networking; access to formal learning programmes about aspects of business; support in developing business plans, and practice in pitching; and they will be offering concentrated 'accelerator' programmes for the development of new businesses.
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?
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