Geoff Mulgan

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Social reform in changing times Adelaide, April
2007
Geoff Mulgan
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How does innovation happen? Where do innovations
come from? How do they grow? Whose job is it?
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• Self-build housing
• Congestion charging
• Magazines sold by the homeless
• Resilience programmes for young people
• Neighbourhood wardens
• Integrated childcare
• Wikipedia and Ohmynews
• Complementary medicine and hospices
• Micro-credit and consumer cooperatives
• Fair trade
• Zero carbon housing schemes and community wind
  farms
• Land trusts
• Patient led health schemes
• Carbon credits and trading
• Restorative justice and community courts
• Timebanks and Pledgebanks
• . c

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Collective intelligence (CI)

• Familiar ideas of IQ, multiple intelligences, EQ,
  social intelligence
• My interest societies capacities to think,
  decide, achieve their most important common goals
• Contributions of many sub-systems politics,
  business and markets, media, academia, civil
  society
• Observing, measuring, scanning, theorising,
  adapting, designing, shaping, learning, arguing,
  negotiating, recombining

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CI depends on

• Human capital (though not enough USSR as
  example)
• Social capital and ability to cooperate
• Organisational capacities
• Network structures and linkages internal and
  external
• Systems that reward improvement, new ideas that
  work

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But

• Always a large gap between potential and
  achievement in any society
• Blockages, weak capacities make societies slow to
  adapt, recognise needs
• Some crucial parts can dumb down (media?
  politics?)
• Even the best are optimised for themselves not
  for wider society
• Particular weaknesses in linkages, systemic,
  holistic

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• Childhood in Australia and regular visitor to
  Adelaide
• policy-maker, futurologist, writer on
  meritocracy, family, old age
• creator of over 60 organisations all embodying a
  radical vision of social change, from patient-
  led health to post-chronologism

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• straddled many systems
• insider and outsider
• always taking no as a question
• small changes with potentially big leverage
• just do it!

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www.youngfoundation.org
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Politics driving change responding to threats,
opportunities, public demands and bureaucrats
promoting new ideas
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Cheongyecheon in Seoul, South Korea
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Academics knowledge transfer into society
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Business .
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Individuals catalyse
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One person with a belief is equal to a force of
99 who only have interests John Stuart Mill
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but usually as part of broader movements
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Its amazing what you can achieve if you dont
care who gets the credit Harry Truman
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Change starts on the edges but then moves to
the centreStarts as informal, inchoate
becomes formalised, routines, manuals
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Alliances between Bees small groups,
individuals with insight and ideas
Trees big organisations (governments, companies,
foundations) with power and money
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Work and family

• Shift of women into workplace equivalent to shift
  from rural to industrial in late 19th that gave
  rise to all modern labour relations rules
• Accumulating responses in personal life, civic,
  business, academic, policy, legislative responses
  still in motion but dependent on activists
  finding levers in big employers, parliaments

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Health

• Eradication of smallpox, combination of science,
  state programmes, very localised innovations
• Shift from acute to chronic disease as core of
  health system, again with personal, civic,
  intellectual, policy shifts sometimes in tension
  sometimes reinforcing each other

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Whats the problem? Change too slow, erratic,
blocked, frustrated
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• Climate change
• Poverty
• Rapid urbanisation
• Ageing and isolation
• Diversity and conflict
• Chronic disease and disability

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Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
Index of sustainable economic welfare (ISEW)
Happiness
Time
1950s 60s 70s 80s
90s 00s
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Strong systems for technological innovation, weak
systems for social innovation
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What can accelerate social innovation and
adaptation? What can amplify collective
intelligence?
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• Government and public sector
• Academia
• Business
• Civil society
• Active public

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evidence performance management measurement analys
is testing, piloting, continuous learning policy
adaptation
public and user feedback choice engagement politic
al argument
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• Strategic success also depends on innovation
  50-80 in economy
• In technology and science funding systems,
  committees, prizes, large proportions of GDP
• But far less for social and public innovation
  ad hoc, random, no-ones job, impeded by silos

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• For the public sector
• Finance for innovation and social RD
• More open source innovation systems health as
  exemplar
• Experiments, laboratories, learning networks,
  zones
• Empowered citizens
• Public sectors that cultivate their hinterlands
  porous to new ideas, providing markets for
  outcomes
• More open styles openness as the default
• Public data made available for matching, mining,
  mashing

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Role of open knowledge in politics,
government Role of challenge from outside in
renewal
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• For civil society

• New ways of mapping changing needs
• Wider range of responses from campaigns to
  social enterprise to partnerships
• New forms of finance for innovations
• Incubation and taking seriously role as
  discovery mechanism
• Full use of global networks

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COPYING, SCALING, REPLICATION, DIFFUSION, GROWTH,
TAKE-OFF
favourable environments, effective demand -
ideas models licensing franchising
takeovers organic growth
boundedness of the idea (what, who, how, where)
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• For universities
• New approaches to knowledge transfer and
  adaptation beyond the linear model
• Embedded academics working in teams
• Collaboratives linking policy makers, front line,
  users, academics on problem solving
• Intelligence on live issues
• Integrating tacit knowledge in fields like
  chronic disease

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• For business
• Opening up capacities for social challenges
• Learning service innovation
• User-driven innovation
• Open source methods
• Preparing for economy where the biggest sectors
  are health, education, care

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Active publics

• People as competent interpreters of their own
  lives
• The missing element in many innovation strategies

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Ensuring flows of new ideas every field needs
to know its pipeline
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Ensuring capacity to cope with learning

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The barriers to collective intelligence

• Subsystems optimised eg academia with research
  quality, politics focused on swing voters,
  business on quarterly returns but not good at
  systems
• Lack of metrics for collective intelligence - yet
  critical to success of cities, regions, societies
  
• Underdeveloped methods and processes for
  organising in holistic ways, fully exploiting
  public intelligence, experience
• Need to cultivate new habits and cultures

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Who helps who in a town or city
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Housing
Close-up of Housing
Global View of the Local Strategic Partnership
Finding Karen Scott vital when innovation in
housing is needed
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Collaborators
Fire Tom Hiskins
NRFJean Bennett
NMTPaul Sutcliffe
Marti Lean
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• Reveals the underlying structure of knowledge and
  learning in a field
• Who makes collaboration work
• Issues of retention and succession
• How some organisations better connectors/collabora
  tors than others
• Combined with effective intelligence and
  similar methods to reveal dynamics of
  collaboration

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Government Effectiveness
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• The Future?
• Before 1900 scientific and technological
  innovation relied on energetic individuals
• Then became organised, structured,
  professionalised with substantial private and
  public investment
• Social innovation starting a parallel transition
• Developing a similar range of institutions
  finance, scaling methods, linking individuals,
  teams and networks for collective intelligence

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Every truth passes through three phases. First
it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident Scho
penhauer
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South Australia?

• SA has many of the elements in place to be a
  showcase of collective intelligence
• Traditions of creativity and innovation
• Thinking capacity in University city
• Scale to act quickly, ethos of seeing world as a
  toolkit
• Gandhi live like you expect to die tomorrow but
  learn like you expect to live forever

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