Latest thinking

Pioneering Research

Blog

04 Mar 2009

I visited Pioneers 2009 this afternoon; an EPSRC event with the aim of "connecting business with pioneering research". I missed the seminars from earlier in the day, but the exhibition itself was in a big (but not overwhelming) room on the 3rd floor of Earls Court Conference Centre, divided into four themed zones full of EPSRC-funded academics showing off their research projects to delegates from various technology-led companies.

Forget Brown's apology - it's time for big thinking about the future

Blog

04 Mar 2009

Matthew Taylor

The media's facile and self serving obsession with whether Gordon Brown says sorry (damned if he does, damned if he doesn't) detracts from a much bigger question. Will our Prime Minister, or any other politician, start to talk seriously about how the new world we are entering into will and should be different from the old? Or will he persist with the argument that if only we find a fix for the crisis the new world can be just like the old, except with new regulation for city whizz kids and lawyers to find try to circumvent (thus defining the contours of the next crisis).    

We're all offenders

Blog

03 Mar 2009

I have difficulty with the word ‘offender’.  I didn’t until I heard Frances Crook speak at an event last year when she remarked that the term has no real meaning given that most of us at some point or other has probably committed an offence.  Frances has a point – consider the following questions.

Me, Vince Cable, and the Child Trust Fund

Blog

03 Mar 2009

Matthew Taylor

For some unknown reason I find myself this afternoon on a panel at the National Housing Federation’s Leaders Forum. It’s not hard to see why they chose the other panellists: Lord Falconer, former housing minister and now Chair of a major housing association, Professor Christine Whitehead, housing expert from the London School of Economics and none other than Vince ‘Oracle’ Cable. But why me?

Turning archives into social media spaces

Blog

02 Mar 2009

Just spent a little while taking  a brief but enjoyable gambol in  this new gallery/museum-based social media project, Creative Spaces. It's a beta version, but already creates a great model of how to make collections more accessible, and how to let the public use material that might otherwise be gathering dust.  I should get out more, I know, but I do like the idea of not having to travel to museums.

Fred, the rich and compulsory good causes

Blog

02 Mar 2009

Matthew Taylor

A bit of a consensus is emerging about the ‘Fred the Shred’ pensions debacle.  On the one hand, people find Goodwin’s determination to hold onto his pension inexplicable and obscene, given the misery his bad decision-making is causing.  On the other hand, there is a strong suspicion that Government ministers are using Fred-baiting as a useful way of avoiding more difficult discussions about the overall crisis, or as a way of currying favour amongst Labour activists.

A tale of two bankers

Blog

02 Mar 2009

At the Ashden Directory blog Robert Butler writes about Mohammed Yunus, founder of Bangladesh's Gameen Bank, and deliverer of Thursday night's Ashden Awards lecture:

A wake up call for the public sector

Blog

27 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

Steve Bundred, chief executive of the Audit Commission, gives it to us straight this morning in The Times:

Why migration policy is never right

Blog

26 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

My old friends at ippr have a report out today on immigration. In typical ippr style the work is balanced, evidence based and progressively inclined. It comes to the conclusion that there is no net impact on the existing workforce as a result of immigration. However, all the evidence upon which the project was based comes from before the recession, so I fear it won’t cut much mustard with the kind of people who have been protesting against the hiring of foreign workers.