Keys to Social Innovation

The Young Foundation and Geoff Mulgan have published a number of reports and books on social innovation, public sector innovation and public strategy. They are also working actively on recession responses.

Previously he was:

• Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street (under British Prime Minister Tony Blair)
  

• Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (formerly known as the Performance and Innovation Unit)
  

• Co-founder and Director of the London based think tank Demos (from 1993-98)
  

• Chief adviser to Gordon Brown MP in the early 1990s
  

He has written a number of books including:

• Communication and Control:networks and the new economies of communication (1991),
• Politics in an Anti-Political Age (1994),
  
• Connexity (1997) and
  
• Good and Bad Power: the Ideals and Betrayals of Government (Penguin 2006).
  

He has written numerous Demos reports and pamphlets.


His current base, the Young Foundation, mainly works on social innovation - design and launch of new social organisations, but also produces some publications, including recent ones on social innovation and the state of British society.



He has lectured and advised governments around the world on policy and strategy - including China, Australia, the United States, Japan and Russia.

He is profiled in two books - The New Alchemists (1999 by Charles Handy) and Visionaries (2001 by Jay Walljasper). He is a trustee of the Design Council and the Work Foundation.

Geoff Mulgan (born 1961) is director of the Young Foundation based in London and Visiting Professor at University College, London, the London School of Economics and University of Melbourne as well as being the chair of Involve.

He obtained his Ph.D. in telecommunications from the University of Westminster. He was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and obtained a First Class degree from Balliol College, Oxford. Mulgan was also trained as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka , but instead worked in local government and academia in the UK, and became an influential writer on social and political issues in various newspapers and magazines in the 1990s. He was made a CBE in 2005.

Substitute the word Laptop, with the word Education

The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. Now he's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.



It's an education project, not a laptop project. Inexpensive, durable, networked laptops are important to better education everywhere in the world, empowering children and communities, and sharing access to modern skills with every child on the planet.







Substitute the word Laptop, with the word Education, and you have much of the answer. XOs make it possible to collaborate, learn, teach, and publish at no cost. They inspire new forms of learning, and attention to education. And the provide access to digital texts in places too remote to send and update physical books in a cost-effective way.





Why you should listen to him:


A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, Negroponte was perhaps best known for founding and directing MIT's Media Lab, which helped drive the multimedia revolution and now houses more than 500 researchers and staff. An original investor in WIRED (and the magazine’s "patron saint"), for five years he penned a column exploring the frontiers of technology -- ideas that he expanded into his 1995 best-selling book Being Digital. An angel investor extraordinaire, he's funded more than 40 startups, and served on the boards of companies such as Motorola and Ambient Devices.


But his latest effort, the One Laptop per Child project, may prove his most ambitious. The organization is manufacturing the XO (the "$100 laptop"), a wireless Internet-enabled, pedal-powered computer costing roughly $100. Negroponte hopes to put millions of these devices in the hands of the children in the developing world by 2010.


"If Nicholas Negroponte can achieve his ambition of distributing $100 laptops to the world's disadvantaged children, he will help redefine philanthropy and see his name added to a list alongside the likes of Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller."

Technology Review

Bill Gates unplugged

A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world once, while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. He plans to do it again with his very own style of philanthropy.



Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them.

 

Happiness as your business model