I took this picture at a tube stop earlier. (Is that allowed?) I’ve been thinking lots about ‘open-sourcing’ of world-changing ideas recently - surely if you love something, you should set it free! I remember reading in The Times last year that too many entrepreneurs with social aims ‘hoard’ their ideas and need to [...]

In the spirit of ‘Design for the other 90%‘, a 28-year old Shawn Frayne has been developing small scale wind power for LED lamps and radios in the homes of the poor. Right now wind turbines are expensive and big, and they don’t scale down well as there is too much friction in the gearbox [...]

Earlier today, Ed Milliband, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, was speaking at a conference I was attending on creating the conditions for public sector innovation. He made the point that this is necessary, but easier said than done, particularly when the public sector doesn’t enjoy the same levels of ‘creative destruction‘ as the [...]

Instead of being mayor, be an entrepreneur. Build and run companies that transform lives. Village is a realtime strategy game for the PC that immerses the player into the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the Third World.”
We are increasingly aware of the problems of unsustainable development. [...]

It’s easy to overlook the knowledge capital that exists at the grassroots. I’ve been reading a paper on this subject by Professor Anil Gupta, who teaches at the Indian Institute of Management (incidentally, the world’s most selective MBA school!) in Ahmedabad. In it, he challenges the implicit assumption in most development efforts, that the poor [...]

Media-savvy Richard Branson seems to have caught on to the green agenda, and he sounds quite serious: ‘going green makes smart business sense‘. His latest company, Virgin Fuels, is investing heavily in carbon efficient alternatives to oil, such as biofuels. If the oil price stays high, investing in biofuels should produce good returns - [...]

For a long time the business sector and citizen sector haven’t been playing the same game, they’ve been using entirely different scoring systems: profit vs. social impact. Increasingly, what we are all recognizing is that economic prosperity, social justice, and environmental sustainability must be advanced at the same time if we want to respond [...]

Speaking to Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Yunnus, last year, about his work and ideas for the future, he disclosed that the trick to success is to closely observe what everyone else is doing, and then do something totally contradictory. He set up the Grameen Bank because he was convinced that it was, in [...]