innovation
Innovation in the Age of Austerity
If this is genuinely going to be a 'once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the way that government works,' then the Comprehensive Spending Review will need to leave room for risk and innovation
"...The Defence budget could face cuts in the region of 20%. With this kind of pressure on getting value for money, resources will be spent on things with provable outcomes. I am not suggesting that resources be diverted away from frontline troops, leaving them under-equipped or vulnerable. But what if current strategy - armored vehicles, drones and well-equipped foot patrols - is not the answer in Afghanistan? What if fully committed investment in blue-sky thinking about the war in Afghanistan could pay off in a way that continued spending under a strategy that has seen UK forces fighting there for close to a decade cannot?.."
Budget 2010 - Civil Society and Social Innovation
Baby steps towards a social investment economy
"...Red book section 6.45 announced £1.3bn of ringfenced funding to be given to local authority discretion, reducing pertinent indicators to 18 and various streams from 110 to 94. Not exactly 'freeing the slaves,' but baby steps towards some promising thinking in this direction..."
Beyond Paper: Money 3.0
The Future of Money, Part Two: with the budget exactly a week away, Guest Contributor Chris Cook reports on radical innovations in digital cash
"...In Colombia, a new service provider's business model is simply to bring a bank together with a Telco and the tens of thousands of local 'Mom and Pop' shops which underpin Colombia's economy. Perhaps the best known example is Safaricom's MPESA payment system in Kenya, which had 15 million subscribers by the end of 2009, and is now branching out into areas such as crop insurance..."
The Loan Shark Killer
The Future of Money, Part One: A pre-budget post on P2P lending's great opportunity
"...Websites like Zopa are more like cutting-edge credit unions, resting on the simple but radical notion of mutual assistance. Consumers may not be tied by geography, as they were in the days of Victorian mutuality, and still are in the microfinance schemes of the Mo Yunus' Grameen bank. Yet the principle is the same, updated for the 21st century..."
Liberty, Innovation, and an Invitation
ResPublica's Deputy Director, Asheem Singh, on the radical future of our most ancient freedoms
"...Only the innovators on our side can stem the tide of the innovators on 'theirs.' And it is not in regulating or auditing the innovators in our communities that we will develop community innovation and ethos – and so real power - but by reforming the concrete connections of the human commons of the future, and so binding future innovators to the cause of helping those communities..."
Adult Economics
Chief Executive of the Urban Forum, Toby Blume, explains the logic of intervention in a market where irrationality is sometimes rational
"...Although it is seen as acceptable to lose money in a declining market, failing to match profits in the midst of a bubble is regarded by financial institutions (and their investors) as a cardinal sin. So instead institutions blithely follow the herd in offering products they know to be of dubious quality. It may be rational for an individual institution to follow this path in order to retain their investors, but the overall effect is anything but rational. The only way to sort out these perverse incentives is through positive, measured government intervention..."
Innovative Ownership
Ownership, Self-Organisation and the Post Bureaucratic Age: the ambient conditions for a radical New Centre Ground?
"...This part of the Cameron agenda is an exciting one for anyone who cares about spreading ownership more widely. While we have argued that the Conservatives' thinking on the post bureaucratic age is at times too evangelical and pays too little attention to the possible pitfalls, there can be no doubt that tying the issue of ownership into the vision of a world beyond bureaucracy presents us with a powerful statement of ethos for our nation..."
