Could crowdfunding be a long-term source of capital for those seeking to finance social, creative or business ventures?
Venture capital has much to be proud of. In the past fifty years, it has helped build a host of great companies, from Intel and Genentech to Facebook and Google.
As one of the projects to benefit from funding through NESTA's Age Unlimited programme, we embarked on a journey of project development which has been both uplifting and enlightening.
The Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Innovators is an interesting list of patenting activity by big companies. But it would be crazy to see it as an indicator of how innovative the UK is.
We've been very interested in the experiences of accelerators over the last few years. These appeared in the US in the middle of the last decade, in IT and web sectors, and some have grown enormously. They bring together a cohort of start-ups and provide them with a mix of intensive support, a physical home and investment. In some cases one or two individuals have been the driving force - as guides, mentors and shapers.
Between October 2010 and March 2011 Cassie Robinson and I worked with NESTA's Big Green Diffusion (BGD) programme, evaluating the journeys taken and impact made by seven projects seeking to explore how their successful environmental initiatives could be spread to other communities more quickly and at greater scale.
There are some new entrepreneurs on the block - and they are running "accelerators"
An interesting event I participated in last Thursday, hosted by the Ove Arup Foundation and the Guardian, looked at future cities. I kicked off by complaining that despite thousands of years of learning about what does and doesn't work in cities, so much design and building results in unpleasant spaces.
How different would your life be if you didn't trust anyone - who could you share a problem with? Who could you ask for advice or help? For some, this can become part of a wider issue of low resilience - an individual's limited ability to deal with things themselves or being more badly affected by a negative incident.
Following last week's announcement of the Alliance for Useful Evidence, Professor Jonathan Shepherd writes a guest blog on how increasing the demand for rigorous evidence will involve capitalising on the instinct of all decision makers.
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