CHARLIE LEADBEATER BREAKFAST

On Monday the 21st September 2009, The Eidos Institute Board and Education City will be hosting a breakfast with Charles Leadbeater, a leading authority on innovation and strategy and one of the most influential creative people in the world.

Charlie will be discussing radical innovation in the public services, including the role of co-creation and user-generated services.

Charlie Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and strategy, and is one of the most influential creative people in the world. He has advised companies, cities and governments, and is former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s favourite corporate thinker.

We-think, his latest book, charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation. It is one of several acclaimed books; Living on Thin Air, a guide to living and working in the new economy; Up the Down Escalator, an attack on the culture of public pessimism accompanying globalisation and In Search of Work which was one of the first books to predict the rise of more flexible and networked forms of employment. He has also written extensively and influentially on the case for more personalised, participative approaches to education, most recently a report entitled What’s Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Education.

In 2002 he was listed by GQ magazine as one of the Most Powerful Men in the UK. The New York Times anointed Charlie’s idea, The Pro-Am Revolution, as one of the biggest global ideas of 2004. In 2005 Charlie was ranked by Accenture, the global management consultancy, as one of the 30 top management thinkers in the world. In 2007 the Financial Times ranked him the outstanding innovation expert in the UK, and in 2008, the Spectator Magazine described him as “the wizard of the web”.

On the user-generated state - “In modern media, software, games and cultural industries, user generated content is all the rage... most of these are built on a dynamic relationship between a company or core organisation that provides the kernel or platform and a large community of users who generate, shared, amend and distribute content.

What would the public sector be like if it too mobilised mass user generated content for care, health, safety and education? For the past decade most of the debate about public service reform has focussed on delivery, making the public sector value chain work more efficiently, to resemble reliable private service delivery. But you cannot deliver complex public goods the way that Fed Ex delivers a parcel. They need to be co-created. That is why these emerging models of mass user generated content are so intriguing. They point the way to a user generated state.”

CHARLIE LEADBEATER SPEAKING ON INNOVATION