Biography

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is a New Zealand innovation award winner, social entrepreneur and holds a number of company directorships. He has gained success through a variety of ventures, encompassing education, ethnic communications, and international distribution of technology. Travis dropped out of high school, saying a system that measured memory rather than critical thinking and application of knowledge did not work for him. He gained a non-traditional education consisting of mentoring from several of New Zealand’s finest business leaders and learning from a number of the best minds on the planet, including lessons from Peter Drucker, Al Reis, Jack Trout, Richard Branson, Jim Collins, Dale Carnegie, Anthony Robbins, and Jack Welch. Travis was born into poverty in Cannons Creek, Wellington. He experienced considerable hardship during his childhood, including living in an overcrowded house with a couch as a bed, in a benefit-dependant family, having to grow their own food as a result of poverty, and surrounded by a multitude of other social ills. These experiences taught him to be self sufficient through hard work and are why he is motivated to help others.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Geoff Mulgan: Post-crash, investing in a better world



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.


Geoff Mulgan poses a question:
Instead of sending bailout money to doomed old industries, why not use stimulus funds to bootstrap some new, socially responsible companies -- and make the world a little bit better?



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