SIDialogues

Latest Tour

Tour Notes

The Charles Leadbeater tour of Australia has concluded. Video and the slide presentation are available right here.

Download the slides here: Charles Leadbeater – Sydney SI Dialogues slides (PDF)

You can view the video of his Sydney presentation here:

There is an interesting and growing discussion happening about the role and impact of social innovation in government and across the public sector.

The points of interaction are growing.

Some deal with issues of citizen engagement, debate and the crowdsourcing of ideas  Some focus on new approaches to designing and delivering public services, often harnessing the growing stocks of public sector information now being made available so people can create new services from value-adding and often unexpected combinations.  Others again are exploring innovative ways to improve transparency and accountability by making the work of government, the quality of our democracy and the business of the public sector more visible and collaborative.

But however they interact, the world of social innovation and the world of government and the public sector are increasingly engaged in new relationships as the search becomes more urgent for fresh thinking, more responsive services and better solutions to complex public policy challenges.

We are delighted to host Charles’ Australian tour for 2011, which will include Sydney, Melbourne and for the first time, Adelaide. The Melbourne and Adelaide events are Seminars, which will include a lecture and workshop. The Sydney event is a Panel which will include facilitated discussion with special guests.

Charles Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and creativity. He has advised companies, cities and governments around the world on innovation strategy and drew on that experience in writing his latest book We-think: the power of mass creativity, which charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning.

We-think was the latest in a string of 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, published in the 1980′s, which was one of the first books to predict the rise of more flexible and networked forms of employment.