On Monday Civitas published a book written by me and Paul Ormerod entitled “Beyond the plc”.  A press release and summary can be found on Civitas’ website here. In this article I want to provide some background to this work in two broad ways.  First, I will frame our thinking in the context of collective […]

Where have all the miners gone?  To judge by the rhetoric of the BBC and other media outlets, whole swathes of Britain lie devastated, plagued by rickets, unemployment and endemic poverty – nearly thirty years after the pit closures under Lady Thatcher! The reality is different.  There is indeed a small number of local authority […]

Opportunities and Risks of the Information Age by Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich) “You’re already a walking sensor platform… You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off. You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you […]

By Greg Fisher This is the second of two blog articles that follow on from NESTA’s roundtable on Systemic Innovation.  The previous blog focused on systems, whereas this one is about innovation. How we view social systems has been fundamentally challenged in recent decades by the emerging science of complex systems.  Stuart Kauffman described this […]

By Greg Fisher Recently, Paul Ormerod and I were invited to a round-table at NESTA to discuss systemic innovation.  After that meeting, we were invited to write a blog reflecting on this issue.  I thought I might be neat to write two articles, one on systems and one on innovation.  Here I will tackle systems and, […]