Geoff Mulgan: New frontiers in social innovation research
Nesta has
published a new
book with Palgrave which contains an introduction by me and many
important chapters from leading academics around the world. I hope that many
people will read it, and think about it, because it challenges, in a highly
constructive way, many of the rather tired assumptions of the London
media/political elite of both left and right.
The essay is by
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, perhaps the world’s most creative and important
contemporary intellectual. He is Professor of Law at Harvard (where he taught
Obama); a philosopher and political theorist; author of one of the most
interesting recent books
on religion; co-author of an equally ground-breaking recent book
on theoretical physics; and serves as strategy minister in the Brazilian
government.
His argument is that a
radically different way of thinking about politics, government and social
change is emerging, which has either not been noticed by many political
leaders, or misinterpreted. The essence of the argument is that practice is
moving faster than theory; that systematic experimentation is a faster way to
solve problems than clever authorship of pamphlets, white papers and plans; and
that societies have the potential to be far more active agents of their own
future than we assume.
The argument has
implications for many fields. One is think-tanks. Twenty years ago I set up a
think-tank, Demos. At that time the dominant model for policy making was to
bring together some clever people in a capital city to write pamphlets, white
papers and then laws. In the 1950s to 1970s a primary role was played by
professors in universities, or royal commissions. Then it shifted to
think-tanks. Sometimes teams within governments played a similar role – and I
oversaw several of these, including the Strategy Unit in government. All saw
policy as an essentially paper-based process, involving a linear transmission
from abstract theories and analyses to practical implementation...
