I want to open up your thinking a little bit, but first it’s worth just reiterating why we’re talking about this now and why this can feel like such a frustrating area of policy.

Firstly, the demographics are only going in one direction. The number of people who will be entitled to benefits as they’re currently structured is going up. This terrifies Government because historically it has been such a difficult area to reform.

The economy is also – in the minds of people who make decisions about benefits – only going in one direction. GDP in real terms is going down and despite the rhetoric about a ‘growth agenda’, politicians and civil servants are preparing for a long slow period of stagnation.

This leaves us with a problem – there are less ingredients but the diners are all getting hungrier. It’s pretty depressing place to start but I just want to offer three ways to think differently. I think the only way that big systems like this change is by demonstrating that an alternative way of thinking about the problem can have better outcomes for everybody. Arguing inside the current system can be incredibly frustrating.

Think about different financial models

Some people talk about in terms of handouts, scrounging, allowances. But the aim of most benefits is to change things. Could benefits payments be investments where everybody has an incentive to make things work because their interests are aligned?

Or rather than looking at the benefits themselves, look at the costs of administering them and see if you could do it better. Just one example I’ve found is that the cost to Local Authorities of administering housing and council tax benefits in 2005 was about 5% of the total spent. That sounds quite good until you realise that cost was £880m.

Think about how this could work without Government

Think radically and without the constraints of the state having a monopoly on decisions about benefits. Look at what happens with foreign remittances for example. Developing countries receive $325 billion in payments from their relatives in other countries. That’s three times the amount that they receive in aid payments from Western Governments and some evidence suggests that it’s much better spent.

Think practically

My hunch is that nothing in this world moves because of evidence or logic. It’s a world of half-baked ideologies that barely mask some pretty hateful prejudices – on the part of almost everybody concerned. This means you constantly risk logjam if you follow the usual channels of protest or lobbying. I think the way to argue your case is to show how things can be better practically – creating new schemes where everybody benefits.

I don’t know about you but when I read, watch or listen to the news at the moment I get pretty depressed. The Today Programme seems to be a relentless torrent of unsettling events and terrible things that might happen. The newspapers are full of institutions failing and people to blame. Even Twitter and Facebook have become just links to more doom and gloom.

And it’s easy to find yourself feeling pretty small in relation to the complexity of the problems we face. If you don’t have any money, don’t have any position of political power or a large organisation you can boss around, it can seem like an impossible task to get us from here to where we want to be – a society where we’re all safe and able to live fulfilled lives.

It’s only when I think about what’s changed in the last ten to fifteen years that I feel more optimistic.Technology, mainly created by small startups, has changed the way that we consume information and products. Correspondingly it’s revolutionised the sectors where that’s been easiest to do – advertising, music, film and retail. The dinosaurs fight back occasionally – as has been the case with the companies almost getting SOPA to the point of being agreed. But overall, they’ve had their day. I think the day the internet ‘went dark’ yesterday was probably a turning point.

What I think is interesting is that the same types of technology are actually only just beginning to change the sectors that are the most important ones for social progress – sectors like healthcare, education, care for our elders, energy, food. The reason is that they’re tougher problems to solve but everything we’ve learned from the last decade of the internet can be put to good use.

What I think we’ve learned is that technology is a great tool to reorganise systems. It’s a tool for us to imagine, then prototype, then grow new ways of organising that change the way people behave and reach millions of people. Sometimes the technology itself is pretty obvious and simple – it’s just never been used like that before. As Clay Shirky says, “tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”

Over the last few years I’ve tried to work with teams to help them turn ideas into startups and I’ve done my best to learn from some of the best in the business in the US and Europe. I think what’s emerging is a pretty simple pattern that you can use to develop sustainable social innovations.

• Find a need (and a customer)
• Build something simple and measure its impact
• Learn what works and what doesn’t
• Do it again

There are then tricks to every one of those stages but it’s only when you’ve got it working that you should try to get bigger. If you get it right, scaling becomes easy because lots of people will want to help you, whether they are investors or customers or people who want to work for you, but there’s no point in forcing those things until you know you have something good.

I guess that’s really what we’ve been trying to do with Social Innovation Camp and now with Bethnal Green Ventures. We’re learning that you need real discipline to do it well – and at its best design thinking is just that. Creativity matched with honesty and perseverance. I think that over time if we’re all meticulous about the way that we try to create social innovation, the gloom that pervades our society might start to disappear.

I spent the weekend in Amsterdam for the first Quantified Self Europe conference which follows on from an event in Silicon Valley earlier this year (written up by the FT here). I learned a lot and thought I’d pop some notes up so you can see what’s been going on.

First presentation of the weekend was Rain Ashford talking about wearable computing. She showed how McLaren are using sensors inside the suits of Formula One drivers to try to monitor the drivers as well as they monitor the cars. McLaren call this “human telemetry” and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see a few spinouts from them over the coming years. She also showed some electronic tattoos that included circuitry and another experiment by the Australian army that is developing flexible solar panels to be used in the field to power equipment. There’s work at Nottingham Trent University to put components into yarns in the first place and then she showed some lovely examples of knitted accelerometers. Pretty much the opposite aesthetic to some of the medical stuff you see around.

My favourite talks of the weekend were the show and tell sessions. I loved this heart rate monitor for swimming that is built into a pair of goggles. The idea is to give you simple feedback about whether you are in the optimal heart rate zone for training with a system of LEDs that just gently glow red (too fast), green (just right) or orange (go faster).

Christian Kleineidam gave a really impressive presentation showing what he’s learned about his own lung function by tracking it using a simple peak flow meter and how he’s managed to improve it by experimenting. This was a great example of pro-am medicine for me and showed the limitations of professional diagnosis that’s done in snapshots (or appointments as we tend to call them).

Kiel Gilleade talked about his experiment tracking heart rate data for a year at Liverpool John Moores University. A lot of what he found was how people reacted to the data because they could track it in real time on twitter. He also had some interesting lessons about the effects of alcohol on heart rate above a certain level whereby sleep would consistently be disrupted for two nights following a bout of heavy drinking (he reckoned over 4 pints).

The strangest looking presentation was of a cheap brainscanner – consisting of a device that has been developed for playing computer games and a clever app that turns the signals into images. I have no idea what you would use this for, but at $299 for the scanner, it’s a lot cheaper than having people sit in an MRI machine.

There was a lot of buzz around Nancy Dougherty’s project which took a completely different angle. She got interested in placebos – particularly the experiments which seemed to show them having a positive effect on some illnesses and wondered whether they could have an effect on mood too. She created pills that she would take to try when she felt certain ways – then she added a tiny transmitter to the pills that would be activated when they hit her stomach so she could track which ones had an effect. It was a great example of how actually some quantified self stuff can be completely counter-intuitive.

I loved the story of Asthmapolis. The Economist have a little bit of it here but it really showed the potential of the data collected by self trackers to public health authorities. At the moment I don’t get any sense that there’s anybody in the NHS for example looking at how macro data could be analysed to try and improve the system. The story was told by Steven Dean who runs the DIY health course at ITP which sounds like a lot of fun.

Gary Wolf was excellent throughout the weekend – mainly moderating sessions and asking tricky questions of the presenters. He’s not a straightforward cheerleader for QS and is keen to probe the limitations as well as the benefits. He points out that feedback (as described in cybernetics) often doesn’t work for health. If things don’t go well as you’re measuring, people tend to give up. There’s interesting thinking around second order cybernetics - but as yet nobody really has an answer to how you deal with peoples’ aversion to measuring things that aren’t going well.

Finally – this was a brilliantly organised event that others could learn a lot from. It was a great venue, the tickets were affordable, the food was excellent and designed to keep you alert including lots of healthy snacks. There was great wifi, lots of power sockets around and no grandstanding – people were pretty much just saying what they did, how they did it and what they learned. Kudos to the organisers.

Related articles

• Quantified Self Europe starts! (quantifiedself.com)
• In Body Tracking, Interfaces matter (thewavingcat.com)

In one version of the story, the inventor of the game of chess shows his creation to his country’s ruler. The emperor is so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to name his own reward. The clever man asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows: one grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so on, with each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous. The emperor agrees, thinking that this reward was too small. He eventually sees, however, that the constant doubling results in tremendously large numbers. The inventor winds up with 2 to the power of 63 grains of rice, or a pile bigger than Mount Everest. In some versions of the story the emperor is so displeased at being outsmarted that he beheads the inventor.

Their point is that in an era of exponential increase in the power of technology, things get only get really interesting in the second half of the chessboard. I don’t think anyone can predict what this means but there are a few things that it seems to me are almost certain to be possible in the next five to ten years. Let’s go for a round number and say that by 2020…

1. Automated translation will be almost perfect. If you’ve tried Google Translate you’ll know that it’s not bad already and the number of languages being added is pretty impressive. It won’t just be on text either. Text from image recognition and speech recognition are improving rapidly too. Just try Word Lens or Siri and imagine when they’re ten times better.
2. It will be possible to track data about location, velocity and acceleration of any object in real time. My Fitbit Ultra is just the start of getting useful feedback – in that case on my own movement but I think the same will be true of vehicles and more. Phones or course can do this but at the moment it drains battery life and the software for doing anything useful with the information is a bit basic.
3. Three dimensional printing of objects will be normal. The question will be one of price but with the printers themselves getting cheaper and the materials as well as companies start to compete to provide them in the right form, companies like Makerbot Industries and Shapeways are just the beginning.
4. Humans will be routinely assisted in physical tasks requiring strength by machines. Even in the gap between James May filming this in 2008 in Japan and this filmed at CES this year, exoskeleton devices have come on a lot. I think they’ll develop further to help us in an ageing society.
5. Road transport will be routinely automated. I think it will happen in trucks first because the driver is a significant cost for haulage companies because not only do they cost tens of thousands of pounds in wages and taxes, they can only work for 4.5 hours before they need a break (legally). The technology for cars is already pretty good – but expect a lot of resistance from the industry.
6. Commercial space flight and delivery of objects into orbit will have begun. This is one of those areas where prizes has really helped but also one where the retreat of the state (NASA) has left a gap for different models to develop. What will the eventual craft look like? Maybe like this or this.
7. Almost all financial transactions will be electronic. Square and NFC devices are examples of how much easier it’s getting to pay for things if you do things electronically. I’d definitely expect a possible all electronic tax system whereby if companies agree to only deal electronically and give tax authorities automatic access to their transaction logs they will be liable to a lower tax regime.
8. Renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels. Almost every week I hear of a new company with a different take on generating electricity whether it’s semiconductors that are thermoelectric or more efficient photovoltaics.
9. Genetic and protein based diagnosis of medical conditions will be common. It took $3 billion and ten years to complete the first sequencing of the human genome. It costs a lot less than that now. companies like 23andme and scientists like Danny Hillis are pushing what’s possible both in terms of price and functionality further and faster.
10. Stem cell therapies will be common. There’s a lot of work going on around the development of stem cell technologies for the treatment of deafness, heart disease, corneal injury and diabetes amongst other things. Whether these will have become available beyond trials I don’t know. But I think they’ll be possible.

Lots of other things will develop and I’m sure I’ve missed some obvious ones. How we’ll have adapted I have no idea – looking at the political world today I struggle to see how our institutions are equipped to adapt. But overall I’m optimistic about the technological tools we will have at our disposal. As always, whether they make the world a better place or not will be up to us.

Related articles

• The Seduction Of The Exponential Curve (forbes.com)

From what I’ve seen (and I readily concede that this is anecdote, not data), founders often see policy as irrelevant, inherently evil, or hopelessly unresponsive. Given that reality, getting founders to substantively engage in policy discussions will be fruitless until that reality changes. That issue seems bigger to me than all of these individual policy concerns combined.

I’m currently more interested in the other side of the coin – not what government can do to help startups but whether startups can help government. I’ve written a piece for Ethos Magazine called ‘Aim big, start small’ that argues that if Government wants to save money and achieve better social results then they’re better off working with new startups who can look at the problem from a different angle:

Unless things change, the public sector is going to find it hard to work with the most innovative of startups and miss out on the potentially game-changing efficiencies that their way of solving problems might offer.

I imagine that in years to come, we won’t think of ‘public sector’ as just meaning you work for the civil service, a school or the NHS – we’ll take it to include tens of thousands of other organisations small and large whose aim is to solve social problems. This is going to raise all kinds of questions: should the public sector buy companies for example? In some cases I think that would make a lot of sense and create huge savings. We’d also need to debate whether this would change our expectations of pay, rewards and profits. But overall,  my feeling is that our best bet for creating better social and economic outcomes is to look for ways to get more startups working with the public sector to find better ways of doing things.

I find it interesting that the Whole Earth Catalogue had a massive impact on Jobs when he was a student. He says that “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” (a Stewart Brand line) was the phrase that saw him through. I like the fact that 25 years later Stewart is still finding ways to make young people think – now through the Long Now Foundation and his books. Jobs in turn went on to inspire huge numbers of people working out what they want to do with their lives – through the things he created and the occasional interviews and talks he gave.

It hasn’t made the headlines in the same way but I also found out this morning that James Cornford has passed away. I only met James once but he had a very strong influence on me in the short time we spent together. He set up an essay prize which I found out about somehow – I’m fairly sure the day before the deadline. I remember that I liked the given title “In defence of apathy” and so I decided to have a go. It was one of the first times I sat down and wrote down what I thought. A few months later I got the call to say my essay had won.

The ceremony was tagged onto another event and wasn’t a big deal. But we met afterwards and he told me that the reason he liked it was that mine was just different to everybody else’s and that was a good thing. I was just starting to work for think tanks at the time and ‘stay different’ stuck with me.

So I just want to say thank you to the people who spend time helping people who are working out what to do with their lives and how to do it. It’s important and I hope I can do it too.

Ten years ago I was still reading a daily newspaper in print format. While the newspapers and big media organisations had websites, they were semi-peripheral. I remember that BBC News online went down on 9/11 and we had to transfer to the pub opposite to watch on TV. The big name blog and news sites such as Huffington Post didn’t exist yet. There certainly wasn’t a Twitter or a Facebook.

So in general my media intake was pretty simple – and written in one style. It included some pictures and some advertisements but was written to be readable. It didn’t include lots of ‘jumping off points’ in the form of hyperlinks or related content and there weren’t hundreds of tweets pointing me to new pieces of comments on articles to read through.

At the time I felt like it was relatively easy to write for everyone. Whether it was a conference programme, a website or the policy pieces we were writing, the style was pretty straightforward. It was something like that of The Economist or the Guardian Weekend Magazine of the time. Sentences were fairly short, we used speech pretty frequently and were sure to avoid jargon.

But ten years on, following the huge fragmentation that’s taken place, I’m not sure it’s possible to write for everyone any more. There used to be an ‘internet audience’ – now there are a multitude.  The cacophony of the written word in the internet age makes it harder to write simple, understandable, informative yet entertaining copy. Everything you write has to be for a particular audience and there are very many more audiences than there used to be.

We need an economy that makes things again. And I’m not alone in thinking this. The generation that built the web is tiring of the immaterial and is turning back to objects: to 3D printing, to laser-cutting, to Arduinos. And maybe they can — as with the web — transform hobbies and eccentricities into industries.

We kept it all a bit Bilderburg as we were worried that hundreds of people would want to come and we had no idea whether it was going to work or not, but on reflection it was rather good so we decided we’d do something a bit bigger and more organised next year.  At the end of the three days we all agreed to write down some of our thoughts from this year, so here goes. Ten lessons and questions the discussion raised for me:

1. It’s easy to romanticise the industry of old but much of it was horrible and remains so in the countries where we now outsource many of our manufacturing needs. If we’re to bring manufacturing back to Britain (which I think will gradually happen over the coming decade) we need to think differently about the economics of consumer goods including the jobs created and how to eliminate the environmental impacts.
2. There are very good reasons why the manufacturing of consumer goods and electronics shifted East. The skills of people and companies in China and the other manufacturing powerhouses are absolutely incredible and combined with low wages meant the economics made sense to Western brands. That doesn’t mean is was always the best decision though -  this article on why the US can’t make Amazon’s Kindle is spot on and probably applies even more acutely to Britain.
3. Craft and making things is fulfilling whether it’s a professional or an amateur pursuit. There was quite a lot of discussion of labels we put on different types of activity and people in this area. It brought back the conversation that The Pro-Am Revolution created about how those boundaries are blurring. It seemed that the boundaries were even more blurred today than five years ago to me.
4. We talked a lot about ambition for businesses and I think there was a pretty clear split between people who were looking for this to be a world of lifestyle businesses and those who were more ambitious. Personally, while I think they’re great for the people involved, I’m not a big believer in lifestyle businesses being a driver of social change. I’m looking for ways of creating services and products that radically improve lots of peoples’ lives. As Reid Hoffman says “Things that help millions of people and last forever”.
5. There is massive potential for software and the internet to revolutionise other sectors – including manufacturing. Marc Andeessen’s metaphor of software eating the world is pretty aggressive and I’m not sure entirely accurate but broadly I agree with the power of code to improve the way things and people are organised.  There’s huge potential for digital services that stitch together resources and institutions in new ways.
6. There’s a very important economy in Britain that is hidden from Wired Magazine. It’s a world of railway arches and industrial estates. There were a number of examples of projects that had succeeded by picking up the phone or knocking on doors to see what small businesses did and how open they were to trying new things rather than trying to find people to work with using LinkedIn or Yelp.
7. Everybody loves owls.
8. One thing we didn’t talk about was the renaissance of food businesses in the UK and I wonder what’s going on there. I’d like us to get more people involved next year who are finding new ways of creating food using tech enabled processes. I wonder whether people like Square Mile would have been able to grow in the way they have without technology, both in terms of manufacturing and ways of reaching and communicating with their customers.
9. Dan Hill pushed us to think about what we should tell David Cameron. I’d like to see a huge increase in funding for manufacturing apprenticeships – with financial incentives for people to do them and businesses to take them on. One local government thing would be commercial use restrictions. I think it’s got to the point where it makes little sense to have demarcation within the ‘business’ bracket and I’d get rid of them altogether. I’d also create an empty building tax – doubling business rates on properties that are empty and forcing local authorities to sell all buildings that meet the empty buildings criteria. That way we should have many more spaces where people can start businesses cheaply to see whether or not they are going to work.
10. All good conferences should end with a spot of cricket at Chatsworth House.

Related articles

• My problem with the “Internet Of Things” (magicalnihilism.com)

There are a number of apps that I’ve had a play with, although I have to admit that I’ve struggled to keep up with all of them because some of them require quite a lot of data entry. The ones I’ve settled on are:

• MyFitnessPal – noting down what I eat
• NHS Drinks Tracker – noting down what alcohol I drink
• iMapMyRun – measuring how much exercise I’m doing
• TallyZoo – noting down a few other things I like to track such as how many coffees I’m drinking

So far at least, there’s no app that does all the things I want, so I put this data in a Google Spreadsheet that I try to keep up to date. It started out as a way of measuring my productivity including how many of my tasks on Things I managed to do each day, how many emails I sent and how many words I was writing each day, but I’ve expanded it over time to track the health related data.

There is something very geeky about all this. It suits people who love numbers and data and perhaps those hackers who are always looking for ways to do things that avoid hard work. You have to measure the right things which I guess is dependent on what matters to you – there’s little point in measuring things you don’t care about. But I do think it helps with motivation. In many ways it’s like outsourcing your motivation so you don’t need to worry about it yourself. Once you’ve understood your targets you have something that keeps you honest – be that a gadget or a website that gives you feedback from other people.

I’m fascinated by whether you could create much easier ways to help people analyse their nutrition and activity so that they could avoid health problems. I’m sure not everybody would want to but I think more people than we like to admit are a bit obsessive in hidden ways. The number of people on diets or with tiny things they have to do every day to remain happy is huge.

Personalised preventative medicine, if we can make it work, should be a lot cheaper than personalised medicine where treatment is needed. The savings for the NHS could be enormous. One idea I have is to give people an app that formats data in a way that is useful to them but also to GPs. The app itself is free and if you keep it up to date, you get free prescriptions. The idea would be that over time it would save GP surgeries money because patients wouldn’t be claiming prescriptions as often because they would be getting feedback on their nutrition and lifestyle that would improve their health. Taking on the extra cost of the prescription would be negligible for the GP surgery and the problem of older people not being able to use the technology wouldn’t matter because they currently get free prescriptions anyway.

I’ve decided I’ll head over to the European Quantified Self Conference in Amsterdam at the end of November to find out more. In the meantime I’ll keep collecting the data about my own health and productivity. Maybe by the time we come to the event I’ll have something to share.

Related articles

• FT.com / FT Magazine – Invasion of the body hackers (ft.com)
• Blog – A Physician’s Perspective on Self-tracking (technologyreview.com)
• Counting Down to the Era of the Quantified Self (bigthink.com)

Just to explain a little more, it’s pretty common for government to assume that the ‘entrepreneurial’ community is the important one. But actually the most talented people don’t go to the bigger (more mainstream) events because they attract some fairly awful people. In London they can be described as the ‘social media experts’. The talented people who are doing the interesting work, wouldn’t be seen dead there. Take things like Dorkbot – there’s not a sniff of startup about it. If things get too ‘cool’ the dorks run a mile and they rarely speak to journalists. A friend told me last night about a ‘proper inventor’ he’s working with who blew the roof off his garage when experimenting with changing the coolant in a gadget he’s developed that could just change the lives of millions of people. He’s unlikely to want to be part of a national campaign or even a startup – he just enjoys tinkering.

I think this is why there’s been such a negative reaction to Startup Britain. A lot of people don’t identify themselves as startups. A lot of people in these communities aren’t that British. And there are thousands of people doing and making interesting things who just don’t want any profile. They want to invent things. I’m not anti Startup Britain, I guess I’m just pointing out why I think it created a reflex response from many of the people who it wanted to involve. It’s the problem with anything that tries to be ‘one ring to rule them all’ and one I’ve seen in other domains – Make Poverty History springs to mind.

My view is the organisers would be best focusing on asking what people want and then going away and developing discrete offers for people based on that. A sort of lean startup approach to creating an industry body I guess. I get the sense from their tweets later in the week that might be what they’re doing. Some of those should be actual offers for startups, others should be laser-like campaigns to get government to change things. The CBI and IoD are frankly useless when it comes to helping small companies so it should be easy to do better.

And the Startup Britain people shouldn’t overclaim about what they’re doing – which I think just through the way they attempted to launch they already have. They should read Matt Jones on how much gardening is required to make these things work and be a little more humble about their part.

Related articles

• UK Entrepreneurs Launch StartupBritain With Government Backing, But Not Money (techcrunch.com)