Stimulating Innovation in the Public Sector

Combine the UK’s Forum for the Future with the international innovators from IDEO, then match them with three local British councils and you have the recipe for devising creative ideas for high impact sustainability change in communities.

This article from FFTF’s site, including a nicely produced video should inspire many other local governments to learn from this project and launch some innovative thinking in their own communities. They call it i-Team because its sequence of activities are inspiration, insight, ideation and implementation.

During 2008 and 2009, Forum for the Future and IDEO have been working with the following local authorities that each defined a climate change problem, and set out to tackle it using this people-centred approach:

Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire wanted to incentivise new parents to reduce their energy use by saving themselves money;

Suffolk County Council decided to create a simple yet elegant scheme to significantly reduce their business mileage; and

St Helen’s Local Authority wanted to encourage 12-14 year olds to take the lead on climate change using a cutting edge viral marketing campaign.

hyperlocavore Says:

March 29, 2009 at 7:34 am

Hello!

I used to lurk on the WeLL a lot, so it’s cool to bump into you commenting on Jamais’ blog.

I’ve set up a site called hyperlocavore.com – which Jamais characterized – aptly I think – as “open source peer-to-peer agriculture.” It’s a social network built to hyper-localize folks in their neighborhoods, and to help people build and develop yardsharing arrangements for urban/suburban agriculture, in order to grow more organic food, as close to home as possible. It’s also about promoting the kind of neighborhood social spaces that City Repair has creating in Portland Oregon.

Two posts that might be of interest:

What is yardsharing?

http://tinyurl.com/dg55zy

And for fun
!00 Reasons to Become a Hyperlocavore

http://hyperlocavore.wordpress.com/100-reasons-to-be-a-hyperlocavore/

It always makes me happy when I bump into someone from my happy days on the WeLL.

Take care,

Liz McLellan