- Welcome everybody to the next lecture in my series of Innovation & Entrepreneurs in a Wellbeing Economy. And the reason I really would like to talk about this is because there's a presumption that somehow as we move through these different waves of ideas about what society needs and how things are going to change, that somehow the people will change with it. And what I wanted to focus on today is about how very different the innovation process is becoming. And that means that the people inside that innovation space are also going to change. So what are the characteristics of successful innovators and entrepreneurs? What are they going to be in this wellbeing economy? So what are the enabling conditions that they need that are going to help them grow wellbeing businesses because these potentially are quite different from the businesses that we had before. So what I'm going to look at is how the sort of the wellbeing economy is shaped by the co-creation value through co-design and co-production, and what that really means for an innovator who may have come from a tradition with intellectual property rights, with patent law, all assigned to the individual. And now we're kind of moving into potentially a way of working, which means there are many people who are going to be involved in the creation of intellectual property. What I would say though, stepping back a little bit is that there is still a huge debate amongst economists and academics about which are the factors that are most important in producing growth and wealth. I would say that this is also reflected in our politics, and you can often hear different views being espoused often without any real understanding of the underlying processes that really contribute to the growth of an economy or the wellbeing and prosperity such as innovation and entrepreneurship. In fact, very, very few of our politicians have ever actually gone through an innovation or an intraneuronal process. So since it's in another world, they haven't really sort of engaged in that. And in fact, one of the problems that I see sometimes is that there's been a lack of connection between what we might think of as kings in fiscal spending and kind of something in idea of investment in innovation. And this is partly because the way that we have shaped state interventions has always really been around sort of temporary spending. We have a priority setting, we do some landscape, we get back ideas from foresight committees and so forth. And then we sort of spend in the direction for a short period of time. And this is in a way, very unnerving if you're an entrepreneur, you may think, okay, I've got a great idea, but probably I've got to get it developed. I've got to get it out there. And the wave will go after about two or three years unless I feel that there's something more continuous. And so there's a real challenge between connecting the sort of the micro and the macro. Governments are very good at macro policy. They can get the big pieces sometimes aligned in the right order. But it's all the little things that are happening between which we really need to pay attention with because that's where the wellbeing economy is going to be very different from the kind of juggernaut of the economies that we've had up until now. So when we're talking about productive investments, which are going to generate growth and where spending is directed, for example, towards climate change or renewable energy, what we are likely to see then is lots of multiplier effects across all the different industries and that's going to be the very different landscape in which innovators are going to find themselves. So essentially small pieces could link together many large bits for the puzzle. What I would say though is that a lot of social commentators who are talking about impact investment at the moment, think that the highest order problem is sort of the long term inadequacy of productivity enhancing investments in technology and human and organizational capital. So they often cite that increasing demand for example, for housing affects the industry's supply chains. But that in my sense, pales in comparison to when we talk about upskilling people. Because in a sense, as long as you can provide people with the makings of a new industry, whether it's energy efficient materials, in IT enabled mobile home working and so on, then actually the creativity, the innovation that will come around that is what will make wellbeing look really very different because it's going to have that contextual feeling to it and it won't be simply take something off the shelf. What that does, of course, is create huge numbers of opportunities. If you're not expected to always find the same thing on the shelf because you happen to live in Wales or in Scotland or in Spain or in France, then actually that opens up enormous opportunities for many people to participate. So the other thing of course, is that a lot of this is happening in the industrial world. And some of you know that I also spend time in Kenya working there in a University there called Strathmore, which is completely committed towards changing the business model for Africa. And what I would say there is that it's a very different style of business school. It's a style that has a lot of ethics built into it, a lot of consistency around communities participating, but it takes into account a huge range of all the particularities, which happen across the continent and the circumstances, which are widely different. And why is it interesting now to compare and contrast business schools is because a continent like Africa is often considered to be one of failed prosperity where innovation might just spring up in a few little places, but we don't have the infrastructure to make it stick, to kind of create the long term investments. But I can tell you that is truly changing. That is really changing and is changing very quickly. So what I want to think about today is what's the prospect for young people, particularly who are coming out of well, not even coming out of university, growing up, it's surrounded by problems, lots of ideas and solutions, and how do they make their way in the world. And one of those things is to talk about what it feels like to be in a developing country where you often find that essentially life experiences have been all about sort of colonial governments extracting labor and taxes from rural households. A lot of anxieties about agricultural productivity, structural transformations, big debt burdens. And yet paradoxically, everyone coming back to the idea after COVID that what we need to do is to create local stability, grow food, keep healthy, and essentially keep the whole population moving along. So in a sense, instead of the rural world being considered the areas of failure, we're now seeing that this is one of the greatest areas of innovation and of entrepreneurship that's emerging out of the continent of Africa. So in a wellbeing economy, growth and productivity are not the sole objectives and rationale. It's about creating change at all levels of the economic system about influencing societal habits and norms, supporting the formation of an effective and dynamic movement towards greater equity and of course shared prosperity. So I want you to remember that because I'm going to show you an example towards the end, which is how do you actually change norms? How do you change people's habits and how do you do it on a massive scale? Because that's really what we are talking about. And I've got an example of how that is actually happening. And another thing that's coming onto the table of course, is as I mentioned at the beginning, is the changes can't be brought about by a single entity, an individual can't do it. It's just impossible. So what we need are ways to make collaboration work. How you can get inspiration from working together, connecting, organizing, amplifying the work of individuals so that you connect people, groups, and organizations together. And to make that happen, we need completely new narratives. So this evening I'm going to talk a little bit about what are those narratives that help people truly understand what it is we're talking about and why the usual suspects may not be the people who are going to be the entrepreneurs of the next 20, 30 years. They're going to be completely different people. So you don't start from scratch, of course not. A wellbeing economy doesn't just kind of pop out and say, well, we are all completely different. But what happens of course, is that there's a lot of change going on and tracking the evidence for that change is rather important. So many of the ideas are available. It's about sometimes creating the work bench, creating the deep work bench and creating the setting for people to come together. What we also know is that many of the ideas sit in very different geographies. And so what we have to try and do is find a way to get those solutions from the edge as I call it discovering them. Maybe they're not written about in social media, but somehow or another, there are small things happening all over the place. And how do we find those? Well, there are very different ways that people are connecting with each other outside of the formal education, outside of universities, outside of the normal way in which businesses are working. And we need to tap into that and accelerate it and really deepen it. So it's really about doing business in a completely different way. And that's really the thing I want to talk about. It's a different form of entrepreneurship. It's got a lot of ethics and ethical approaches embedded in it, ethics that will help us sustain the planet and the health of the planet as well as ourselves. But with that, I would just like to move on to a rather sad moment. This young man, he was one of my research assistants and he was killed on the weekend out in the bush, which was very sad, but I wanted to bring him to your attention because in a way not only was he a core member of my research team, but he led the data analytics work on all the citizen science training. And he is an example of someone I would call a selfless innovator because he would come up with ideas. He would see people struggling with something. Or we would have an idea in the group and he'd go away and he'd come back and he'd say, well, I think we can solve it like this, but he would never claim it for himself. It would always be part of the team, part of what we were trying to do. And I'll show you what it ended up being, which is an amazing outcome. But he really is somebody who was engaged, not a only in the kind of intellectual effort that we had, but also by all the communities who he helped, even down to the point where he was the man who the ladies who couldn't read or write would come to when they had to fill out their tax form, when someone wanted to apply for a driving license, he was the person who they trusted with all of their personal information. So yes, it's very, very sad and Vincent will be sadly missed, but he's holding two of his most favorite things, which is a phone on which we invented a data collection system to go out with all of the warriors out into the forest to do the mapping of the trees completely without words, just with pictures and sounds and so on. And we collected probably one of the most intense botanical and wildlife survey of the whole of East Africa using the platform. And the other one is an audio moth because we've been recording animals and insects and so on all through the forest. So he invented a way to kind of bring them together. So hopefully in the coming time, we'll be able to write all about the things that he invented and bring them over. But they're now run by the communities and they've brought them into being as part of the natural capital company, which is what I'll talk about. So moving on then to, well, innovation very specifically, and really as someone who... I mean, I run a small but about to be sort of hopefully global startup company. And what I have discovered is that when you talk to investors and you talk about innovation which has got a social and an ethical core to it, actually people just want to give you money. Quite honestly, they want to give you money. And I'm not saying it's solving the conscience, but it's people are frustrated because can't connect to the big picture other than lots of small things. And so innovation, and one of the crucial things about the innovation and the wellbeing economy is that the practices need to connect together so that there's a red thread between what you are saying and how it connects to people, whether it's through distribution of wealth in a more equitable way, whether it's protecting the planet's resources, whether it's helping people with their personal health families and so on. And if you put people in nature at the center with an economic purpose around it, then actually what we're trying to do is close that gap between the economy as it has been drawn out very much driven with a substantial degradation of resources and in a sense taking us away from who has power over those resources. And I think that's really one of the key things is that what we're trying to do in a wellbeing economy is deliver good lives for people the first time around, in other words, instead of doing something and then having to do a very expensive cleanup at the end. So we're trying to think before we act, and that really is part of the sort of system thinking that we want to embed in the wellbeing economy. And because of that, we then have a sort of a spiral where effectively there are lots and lots of opportunities and challenges. I'm sure if any of you got together with your neighbors, with your colleagues, you could list innovations and you could list opportunities and challenges. Hundreds of them. The question then is how do you get the ideas that will help you solve them? Sometimes they might be in the room, but sometimes they might not be. And we run lots and lots of processes here in London, sort of all over the world, bringing people together. And it is absolutely the case that even if people have never had formal education, they genuinely have good ideas. It's quite extraordinary how you sense the intuition that people have about their problems, even if they're not necessarily connected to sort of institutions of higher learning. So generating ideas and then developing and testing. And this is something which of course, in the social sciences in the natural sciences you think is well understood. But when you work in interdisciplinary areas, when you work trying to fix or put solutions together, then even as a social scientist, you'll sometimes find you haven't got the pieces of the puzzle. And certainly as a natural scientist, you don't often have the skills to do the kind of social work that we need, longitudinal surveys, interviews, and so on. So there's a whole essence in which doing research now is very different. Innovators need to understand both who and what is giving them sort of ideas and how are these ideas coming about, but how are they sh shape them? And it's no good just turning up with a good technology solution, because if you put it out there, either someone else has done it and it's competing with you or it's completely contextually wrong. So what we've learned of course is that the kind of few technology platforms that we have that have run very well like Apple and all that, of course, they've saturated the market, but outside of that area context really matters. And so developing and testing with people who are going to be using your innovation is extraordinarily important. My own experience recently is that I invented something a way to measure carbon very accurately anywhere in the world. And the very first thing that happened when I spoke to Australian farmers was that they observed that I was using Australian data. And it never occurred to me not to use Australian data, to talk to Australian farmers. But what they said was all the big ag tech companies turned up and told them about their land using data from the USA. Well, that's not so smart, right? And it's just a really wrong message to give people, oh, you are just part of the also ran. It doesn't work like that. So at every simple stage making the case is all about making it real, making it the point. And you can't do that unless you've had the conversation with the people who you think are going to be either the users or the community in which these innovations are going to be embedded. Then of course you have to deliver it. You have to implement it. And then it's the usual stuff about good business about growing and scaling and eventually, and this is the really big thing changing systems. What I like to think is that in the sort of essence of what we're talking about, that the wellbeing economy is sufficiently flexible to be able to change, to able to adapt because the planet is changing at such a pace and we are changing at such a pace that we cannot have a kind of rigidity. So the way that products and services, the way that we bring innovations into our societies today must always have a sense in which they're going to evolve. Now, that might seem completely impossible, but what is helping us do that is this explosion of data and research to transform our lives. I'll give a few more examples later on, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that an innovator, an entrepreneur needs to know their way around data. They need to understand what it is that matters to people and what are the signals. Whether it's the way in which we manufacture our clothes, the way in which we use resources, all of that is going to have meaning both to the innovation process, but also to the entrepreneur. So I'll give you an example in the circular bio economy, there's a huge number of people who are now thinking about how to put the bio in the circular economy. It's no longer just about recycling, reusing, reducing, and so on. It's about, can we be more clever to use things from the biological part of the planet to actually alter not only fossil fuel use, but also to think about what we're producing? So a classic example is in forestry. So we're not going to burn trees, hopefully not so much into the future, but we need trees to be able to turn over. So what can we do with trees that are getting near to the end of their lives and they're in plantations, they're not in sort of sort of ancient forests. Well, up in Finland, where they have now developed a beautiful product which is to use trees to make clothing. And they have now rolled that out. You can buy dresses and clothes on the high street here in the UK, which are made from lycopene and other woody fabrics. And all of these different things are happening to the point then that you see that we don't really have a dependence for many products and services from the fossil fuel community other than our energy use. And even that, of course, as you know. But how did they get there so quickly it's because they asked a question from some chemist and said, what is the common feature between fabrics that feel beautiful? Feel like silk, or feel like a really nice Chanel. What is it? So the chemists go away and they come back with a whole series of occasions, and then they say, and where can we find those in the natural world instead of making them out of fossil fuel feed stocks? And lo and behold, they find them in these different coniferous trees up in the finish boreal forests. And so this idea of being able to draw in data from so many different places to create solutions that were never there at the beginning, I think is really why the data revolution is so impressive. Of course, we hear a lot about data in social media and it's how people connect, but there's also a very deep research question, which is, there is no point in my mind continuing with research unless it has purpose, unless you can really demonstrate the impact that it will have on society. And so having access to information but making it work around information and data is clearly going to be the way to transform our lives. If we then think about taking that one step further, I want to introduce you to an example of a new capital asset. It's called Natural Capital Natural Assets and natural assets can be a whole variety of things. They can be water, they can be plants, they can be trees, many, many things. But what is happening around the world and particularly even in this country is that there's a recognition that people would like to invest in the natural world. And I've talked about this in an earlier lecture. But imagine that you are a community, I'm working in Essex, for example, and we have set aside a very large area of the county to become a climate focus area. Well, how do you make it an attractive place to bring people there so that there can be the investment to help people in fact, make all those changes for climate change. And we are talking about farmers trying to keep more water on their fields so it doesn't run into the rivers. We're talking about people finding ways to deal with waste or slurry on many, many different things. Okay, so the first thing you do of course is identify well, what is this natural asset that we have? How could we use it not only to help us adapt to climate change and mitigate some of the problems, but how can we actually attract investors to help us do that? What kind of investors are there that would be interested in that? Well, it turns out that through crowdfund and many other ways we can create, and there are also green bonds and guilds and so on. There are many ways that people actually would like to invest. And if you think about counties, they have public spending, they have a board and they essentially have investment funds. It's possible for counties to issue bonds. And these bonds can cost slightly less than out on the marketplace. And those bonds help people help the county deliver local change. And what is wonderful actually is that a lot of people would like to see their local counties succeed. And so instead of buying a bond from somebody else, they'll buy a bond from here that will help to actually make the changes on the ground. So this is actually what's happening in places like Essex and it's quite extraordinary. So now let's go over to Kenya and same thing is happening. So 400,000 people have been able to come together to identify their forest, the land, the water, the biodiversity. So identifying the natural asset, figure out who owns it. If it's a community land, make sure that the community land is identified and can be accessed, and then literally bring together a proper natural capital asset, a company that then takes care of this huge resource, making sure that people who are doing good and planting trees and making sure the soil is staying where it is and everything else is really, really in place. So all the mechanisms are there. And then on the basis of that, convert that into financial capital. Now, it sounds kind of unbelievable, but in fact, there's a lot of people who want to invest in that. There are companies that are of promised and given sort of all kinds of things in their corporate plans aims to plant a million trees, for example, because that's what the government would like them to do. And well, why not do it here because then they can link it directly to the livelihoods of people. So the innovation that happening here was in fact, what Vincent was working on was to connect the community development work that had been done, building from the bottom upwards. Co-designing what should this look like? How could this enterprise work? Could we get lots of young people involved as entrepreneurs? How could we do that and then understanding what was happening to this asset, modeling what would happen, bringing people together, creating a co-laboratory. And then out of that, designing the metrics, designing the kind of indices that could then make it into a setting where people would invest and then bringing the community together to deliberate on, well, what are the scenarios? What kind of future do we want here? We want to have better livelihoods. We want our children to go to school. We would like to be able to grow food and eat it and it's healthy. We would like to have access to markets and so on. So that whole stage built trust and in the end it meant that all of this data was used. All of this data has been absolutely essential to underpin the evidence to give people confidence to invest in this particular asset, this particular capital asset. Now the degree of innovation is quite extraordinary because it's not just about counting a number of trees, it's about saying, what are the trees doing and how are they healthy and how many are there and should we plant some more and are the farmers doing the right things and are we growing the right food and so on and so forth? So it has required enormous amount of innovation of mapping, of mobile data and so on and so forth, all done by the communities to the point where we had in the first instances, a natural capital investment platform. And what it did was effectively tick all the boxes on big international policies like Forest Restoration, a big program under the UN, carbon circulation for net zero, indigenous medicines, people being able to grow trees that would actually generate medicines, ticking the boxes on ESG environment, social and governance aspects of companies, and then creating, living shares. In other words, if you've taken care of your land and you've invested and you've been able to bring together, let's say a rather innovative mix of trees and so on, then you'll receive more for your land because it's actually more productive. So this whole way of working has put together not only about a 100,000 households, but has created an opportunity for young entrepreneurs across the whole region to start up small businesses everywhere literally under this big umbrella of the natural capital company to be able to sell carbon. And it's all tied back into this, how many trees, how fast are they growing and so on? And who's looking after them. So these young people are able to possibly bring more revenue into their household than has ever been experienced. And it's quite a sort of transformation that has happened. So it's no longer the agrarian failure that's happened. And what of course is occurring is that production trees like avocados and so on are coming in. And what that's brought is a lot of thinking about new species, new types of watering and so on and so forth. So it kind of snowballs. And what is happening on the ground is this enabling environment has opened up huge opportunities for lots of people. So we have young people now being able to operate a small transport business because there's now actually things moving around and they can get enough money to get there. So it's all little pieces, but people thinking of innovative ways to make a living because of the safety of this rather large collectively community designed, I call it umbrella. So out of all of that, there's a whole series of what we would call innovation design principles. So first and foremost, you should have a goal. There's no doubt about it. I mean, promoting the wellbeing of people and planet, if you just stop and think at every stage of the development of a business, or when you're talking to young people about an idea, I mean, it's a simple checklist. Is this going to be good for us and is it good for the planet? No one size fits all. And that's really important is remember I said of about, don't try and tell an Australian farmer about their soils and use US data. Everything actually is contextual. And although I'm a scientist, I am absolutely amazed at how the slummy slicing of knowledge is incredibly important if you want people to intervene and take care of their patch of planet earth. So contextual is important, but it's also vital in terms of local values and culture and so on. So again, I repeat, it's a wonder to me that some of the best ideas haven't spread things like Mpesa where you can pay on your phone for everything. You don't need a bank account in Kenya. It hasn't spread in many places because the central banks will not relinquish that authority for people to be able to make payments on their phone to the telecom industry. But if you look at what happened with that relatively small innovation 15 years ago and where it is today, it's probably facilitated a fantastically sort of diverse set of businesses and economies across the whole of Kenya and of course in a couple other places. So no one size fits all experiment, things are going to go wrong. So we need to encourage our innovators to have a go. And one of the crucial differences I'll come to this in the moment is the difference between an incubator and an accelerator where we are going to need more and more accelerators, but sometimes you need to have incubators. You need people to come in and feel safe and they can do things and they can go wrong and then you try again. So we need to create these opportunities as well to be able to foster the idea of it's okay to make mistakes. Participatory without a shadow of doubt, the design that comes from a group of people is invariably better. The intelligence and wisdom of crowds, many people snare at it, but there are so many examples where even when you take a group of people who know very little about a particular topic, they generally can come out with a very interesting and close to what one considered to be a good answer. It doesn't always happen. But anyway, the wisdom of crowds is quite often important, but it's particularly important when we're talking about trying to find solution at a community level. Now that's not to say though that the solution doesn't work for all of society. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if you have the confidence from a community led process, then you will in fact be able to see how you get investors in through the door. Recognizing the strength of communities though, is another thing. People have a lot of wisdom often about things that they haven't recognized are missing things missing in the kind of range of observations. When we talk about climate change and we see so many crops, so many changes in wildlife, the movement of disease, and so on, it's extraordinary to note how often when we do epidemiological surveys and we're interviewing let's say livestock handlers or people who are growing crops, how do detect changes? They may take risks about planting a particular crop in terms of, will it succeed or will it fail? But there's also elements about crops that are changing. And so we have people who are not aware of what they're doing, but somehow they're intuitively finding solutions to things such as the production of hydrogen cyanide in certain crops in response to climate change, they saw a variety somewhere else, which didn't give an impact. They go and get it and they bring it and they grow it. And that's going on all the time, literally all the time. So one of the things that is then how do you gather that evidence so it can be used again and again. And there we simply do need to have a lot more explanation of science, a greater and deeper understanding of science itself. And then of course, on the holistic side, we need to bring it all together. In the sense of transforming that knowledge into something meaningful, we know that across the world, we've got a lot of people looking for sort of opportunities to invest, but in a sense, we also have to fix a lot of the problems that we had in the past. Much of the land, much of the ocean is polluted is damaged. And so what we have is a high ambition in the UN it's called the High Ambition Coalition for nature and people. And what it says is that we need to keep having research and communities participating so that half of the planet needs to be brought back into a natural state. And it's about protecting 30% of the planet by 2030 and can continuing to do that. So we're in a kind of polar state at the moment. Only 15% of the land is protected 7% of the oceans, but the cost of doing that is enormous. It's $400 billion every year just to do that bit of the world. So how do we sustain that and how do we grow that fund? Well, one of the things is called the task force on nature related financial disclosures. And what it says is that if you look at the world's turnover, it's about 44, $45 trillion. And you think about how much of that is dependent on nature. Of course, it's more than 70%. So if you really step back and you think about how our world economy is hinged on nature, on natural resources, and yet here we are continuously taking it down. Then the more we can do to essentially put that to one side and to do things like carbon sequestration, do things like water retention and so on the better it is. But how to make sure that we also unlock the potential and mainstream investment in natural assets. And that's, I think a very, very, very tricky thing, because we have so many, so many problems going on in the world. So in many low income countries, you'll see this concept of the last mile. And it's about policies that bring the idea of creating livelihoods by connecting people up to the economic machinery. It's either water or energy. So it's the very last mile, usually the most expensive and quite often they fail. So I have so many pictures of poles with no wires because when they got to the last mile, they discovered that there are populations who don't have enough money can't get connected. Don't know what a bill is, probably don't want to use the energy or the water in the way that it's being delivered. And so the last mile has become the feeding ground, I would say of a huge swathe of innovation because it comes to the point where the jagar note of delivery from the government is we've got it here. We've put the grid in, we've got the wires, we've put the poles in the ground. Why aren't you having electricity in your house? Well, I'm in a mud hat and I've never had a bill before. And I dunno what you're talking about and is it not for free and don't come just out of the wire. So many, many things happen. And as a result of that, the whole thinking about policies that deliver in this way has really kind of moved away because really what should have happened in the case of reaching the last mile would there should have been a community grid, an off grid solution. In other words, a local energy grid, local water production, and so on. But that conversation didn't happen because the big power companies were never really empowered to do it in that way. And so the idea that social entrepreneurs can enter at this moment is absolutely correct. And its not just in developing countries. It also true here. If you go out to the highlands and islands where to be honest, there is a big kind of gap between what is delivered and what's available on the mainland. You find an enormous number of social entrepreneurs who are literally working to create off-grid solutions who have got fantastic ideas about how to use different resources like seaweeds and many other things for pharmaceuticals and so on. So the challenges that the sort of the GDP corporate business thinking has always been that we needed policies that encourage products and services to promote economic growth. And all you have to do, it becomes a sort of means and ends in itself. And all you have to do is effectively just push ahead, even if it is at the detriment of the planet and people. And it's almost like a post hoc justification of those initiatives. So we can fix it later, we can immediarate the conditions later, but let's just push on. Let's just push on. And participation is not really part of the business here at all. What we want to see is policy innovation. So we want to have policies that are developed along the design principles that I put up there because the well being economic policy is a journey. It's essentially saying it's about a transformation from the very beginning. It has to start with a proper meaningful, democratic engagement, understanding what all the diverse views are of people and their priorities. So that actually we can make proper decisions about the values and the goals. Can it happen? Yes and it can certainly happen if the alternatives are appealing. So there are countries which do a lot of devolution and I don't know how many of you are aware of what happens in Wales, for example, where the future generation and all of the way that they're thinking has been premised on just such a model on a wellbeing economy model. And if you look at the way those policies are shaped, they are very, very different to the policies that we have in England, for example. So there is a collection of countries called WEGo the Wellbeing Economy Governments which is made up of Iceland, and Finland, and Scotland. Wales is sort of in the line. Canada has just announced they're going to join, New Zealand. Now, you recognize they're all quite small in terms of population. They may have a large land mass, but they're small in terms of population. But they have taken a conscious decision that policy making and innovation in policy has to go in a very different direction. So it really has to be that it's about an economy where people provide for each other, where they have a right to mold the system in accordance with their own values and aspirations and recognizing that it is a journey of transformation. So this is a whole different way of making policy making compared to a very rigid civil service, which kind of has a slightly paternalistic view where we know better and we're going to give you the answer. So how do you get there and then how do you speed up the adoption of these kinds of policies? Well, I think in a way it's going to happen almost naturally. And I'm talking now about England because one of the things about making policies socially and politically attractive and socially attractive and financially attractive is that there's something in it for everybody. And if you look at what has happened in policy making around land recently, you'll see that there's just a proliferation of policies. There is LMs, which is to do with land management. There's the land restoration, there's the renewable energy process. There's just a whole raft of things. The business readiness, the guilds, the Woodland code, there are so many things to do with food and how we use the land and so on. If you talk to farmers, they're saying, well, we actually have no idea which ones to go for. And what we don't want to do is, we don't want to give away our land for 30 years and have someone else tell us that we have to actually run our land in this particular way. So despite all the best efforts from white hole, it would appear that a lot of farmers would prefer to set up their own system, create their own community, and actually see where the local communities will effectively crowdsource the funds for them to make these changes and for of them in return to produce very healthy nutritious food, and actually try to protect the environment. So recognizing the kinds of assets that people have, recognizing the difficulty that innovators will have, if they don't actually get down to the community level is something that is extraordinarily important. So when we think about moving from the GDP kind of corporate business where there's one solution, and it will fix everybody to wellbeing entrepreneurs who are actually trying to get all of that knowledge in and make it work locally, you can see that we need a totally different kind of education system, a very different kind of training and a very different type of policy making. So I'm going to point again to Essex because it seems to have understood this to the point that it is not only bringing a lot of young innovators in to the council, which is very unusual, but it's also creating a lot of ways in which communities can dialogue around what it is that they want. Creating challenge funds, creating ways for people to participate. And this model I suspect is going to spread to many other places because development banks, sovereign wealth funds all these different financial instruments want to invest in people who are going to make a difference, but they actually want to see it in a rather formal setting. So that's why something like the county councils can provide the backdrop to that. Now there are regulatory challenges because of course you can't have innovators and entrepreneurs running around just inventing things and then sort of manufacturing them and then sort of sticking them out into the market. So that's clear that we do need to have some regulatory process, but the crucial thing is keep your eye on the thing that really matters. And so for me, the umbrella under which this sits is to understand the complexity, understand the real risks and understand what the asset classes are that people have so that sort of natural capital, human capital, social capital, and so on. And with those, you can actually have a slightly hands off approach allowing people to do this from the bottom up. So creating those links at the local level means that people can engage still with large scale projects, because what you really want is for people to articulate. Well, I would like to be able to drive my car if I have one, an E vehicle to a place and have it charging, maybe even contributing to the grid, if I've actually put some electricity into of the battery, but I want to be assured of that. But then I would also like to be in a hub where like-minded people are. So you start to think about the infrastructure because it could be actually quite transformative if you have these sorts of hubs all over the country, but not too far away from each other. So you have the social aspect. you have the infrastructure aspect and so on. So people are generating energy. People are actually contributing whilst at the same time, being able to undertake their work, but they do it in this kind of collaborative space. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money. And this is I think the big surprise is that if you stand back and don't always think about huge pieces of infrastructure, but think about each mile now, or each piece of it, it's very, very clear that people want to contribute to the place that's nearest to them. And so, again, looking at the transport east, they've taken this completely different approach. They've taken an approach where they are welcoming people to come in with ideas, they're welcoming new technologies. They're saying, can you link your new technology to this infrastructure, to this new kind of transportation system? And sure enough, we have hybrids. We have hydrogen, we have all kinds of different energy systems trying to stick themselves into the system and creating much more out of the whole lot. And of course, what happens is that investors are extremely important. And from that, we have the possibility of a new entrepreneurial academy. So two examples, one crowd funding, which I think I mentioned a little bit earlier, where you put the idea of improving something locally, you give your kind of large scale community an idea of how they could participate by making it let's say a county council bond. And everyone feels quite comfortable about that. The county council can use its funds, its pension funds in different ways, but most importantly, people see it. They put their money in and they see something happening locally. So the crowdfund is a really great example of how you can bring people to develop the projects, to do the screening and to decide on how they want to see the public pledge and the money. And First Forward is a group of young entrepreneurs. They have set up in London, but they're also in Lebanon, in the Caribbean, in Kenya and a few other places as well. And what they've been able to do is to bring a small group of investors around once a month, but they connect across the world. So let's say the idea is how do you make value out of waste? You'll have a lady in Grenada, you'll have a person in Kenya, you'll have somebody from London, somebody from Lebanon. And they'd all come in with their different contextual ideas of how to put value how to value waste. And then of course you get an amazing setting where people start to live off each other's ideas and they create and they share the solutions. And then obviously what's happening is of course investors are coming in. They're very interested in this. So it's very unusual to have settings where young people particularly can meet investors. But it's also very rare these days, unfortunately, where young people can have those opportunities to exchange ideas. If you're outside a university, if you're outside a research setting, it is really difficult. And so what's very interesting then is that if you set up environments for collaboration where people can do all of this together, they are always bound for success. So I want to give you one amazing case study. It's called Shujaaz. Now Shujaaz is essentially, it's a community of social ventures. It's Africa's biggest youth brand. And it started out as a multimedia platform, a youth platform in 2009. Today it's got 7.3 million comic book readers. Now you might wonder why the comic book, but in 2009, comic books were actually an amazing innovation. And what the they were doing was to take ideas and stories and put them into the comics. And these comics were sent out to schools all over. But they weren't just comics that were about sort of little stories. These were stories about individuals, real individuals and that's now migrated of course into little videos and so on short ones about people who had made a success in their life. I did this and it worked and I did that and it worked. So they now have hundreds. I think they've got 60,000 little short videos of people who made a success out of something. And so Shujaaz hosts all of that. So you want to find how to set up a little company to sell tomatoes? There's a story there how some young person did it and how they connected it and so on. So that's the multimedia youth platform. The next thing they've done, which I think is really interesting it's really to challenge this idea of a lot of young people they go to university, they get through, they've got their degree and then there's no jobs. I mean, there literally is nothing. They're never going to make it into the formal economy. So they're out there and how can they get into the even the informal economy? What can they do? So what Shujaaz has done is invented something called the Hustler MBA. So the Hustler MBA, there's a very Kenyan word by the way, but it's an MBA system where you gain credits. So you can take courses and you can get a little credit. And if you do something and teach you get another credit. The crucial thing about the credit system is that having gone through this sort of online training program, they've already in the last, since April, they've had 250,000 people go through this peer to peer learning. It's just on a scale you can hardly imagine. But what's amazing is that IKEA comes along, Unilever comes along and says, we are looking for 60,000 salespersons and we don't know how to get them. So they come to Shujaaz because they've got their credit, they've got their badge you see, they've got little thing that says you did something and you are part of this trusted community. So of course they get a job and then the thing starts to take off and then they create new businesses and so on. And so then the last bit, which is MESH is now taking those young people, those 7.3 million comic book readers who've now grown up with the Shujaaz which has changed the norms, changed the social ideas, and now they want to have some business basics. So the MESH is about essentially giving those business basics to all these young people using Mpesa using platforms, using Safaricom to help. So it's a very, very fast growing process, but it is something that is quite extraordinary in the way in which it's sort of reaching out about upskilling thousands of young hustlers as we'll call them people who just make a place themselves in the economy. So I think you get the idea that we don't need incubators as such, we need accelerators. We need to be able to help people move from the idea of long open-ended duration, lots of typically fee based people get in, they have to pay a lot of money and so on into accelerators where you've got it's a fixed duration. It's a two-day, it's a one-day, it's a 30-minute video, but it's got precisely an answer and a solution that a young person is looking for. It's cohort based because you kind of see your colleagues going around. And the great thing about it is that a lot of young people, they only have their friends, they just have their friends around them. But with something like Shujaaz, they suddenly have people who are in a massive network for no fee, okay? So how does it all work? Well, of course, once they start to make their businesses, they can bring a little bit back. They bring a little bit back. And so out of all of that, you need to have very different kind of regulation to help those young people contribute not only to society, but to their own wellbeing, then you need to have what we call anticipatory regulation. And that's really the challenge is that the policy world, the innovation policy world is not quite ready for the innovators and the entrepreneurs of the wellbeing economy. So we have challenged governments all over to do experiments about the futures, the 100 Day Challenge, where policy makers, civil servants and others are brought together to really understand and to respect what communities say to do innovation mapping and the difference between what a community says and what a civil servant says is quite a lot that's for sure. To co-create ideas, innovation. And then in a very short period of time, 50 days, you take a look at the end of a 100 days, you walk out with something which you've built together. And these a 100 Day Challenges are beginning to start to have an impact because they're impacting on the professional boundaries. And I think this is one of the crucial things. I do a lot of training of civil servants. And I think it's challenging people who walk in and saying, I am in the department of energy and that's what I do. And you say, yeah, but you need to also talk to the water people and you need to talk to this and that and that. So this is the crucial thing about being collaborative and inclusive. So the a 100 Day Challenges are beginning to happen all over the world, part of the wellbeing process, but even now much broader than that. And so from that, we are seeing stories, stories of innovation and entrepreneurs from the wellbeing economy starting to well up and stick together and start to take us on a very, very different journey. So what is the characteristic of a wellbeing innovator, of wellbeing entrepreneur? Well, first and foremost, it's not about making a huge amount of money for yourself. It's actually about trying to solve problems for people on planet. But it has to connect to people's livelihoods. And so, yes, of course there are investors, social venture capital that wants to come on board for that journey. But what I've learned in the last couple of years working in this space is that the kinds of innovations and the types of entrepreneurs that come out of that,'cause you need both, you need the ideas and then you need to make something of it. You need to build the business out of it. They are very, very different. And already we can see that nearly all of them are sustainable, that they're going to be here for a long time. They're not just going to disappear as we've seen in the past. So they're more flexible, they're more resilient. They're not as brittle and they certainly are contributing to helping the planet it and the health of the planet. So thank you very much and I'll finish there. Thank you.(audience applauding)- Thank you very much.- Thank you so much.- So Professor McGlade for another fascinating stimulate and challenging lecture. A lot of interest and questions online and there may well be questions in the room as well. I'll take just the first one online here. There's somebody who would like to know, how do you measure the impact of wellbeing entrepreneurs using metrics that could be used across different market sectors?- Very good. So directly I would always say it has to be livelihoods for those who are in the local community. Those who are actually impacted by the particular, let's say innovation. But in terms of other sectors, there is a measure that we would call, which is sort of like an influencing measure. So can you see the tentacle? Can you see the fingerprint of this innovation in another sector? And I think that's one of the things that I would talk about more of our time is that innovations should be put more into functional classes if I can call it that as opposed to a product. So a functional class means it could be doing many things in many industries, and that's what we want. We want solutions that go and spread throughout the economy.- Thank you for the great presentation, professor. Yeah, you mentioned some of the stuff that's happening in like Scotland and Wales, like the Wales having the future generation commissioner. What's like the thing that you'd most like to see the Westminster Government do to advance the wellbeing economy?- What I would target in fact is almost certainly education, a different kind of education, one which is for everybody. In other words, I'm not saying one goes back to school, quite the opposite, but in education where there's respect on both sides. So create the space just like I mentioned in Essex is happening. It's a revolution for people when they realize they're actually being asked for their ideas as opposed to just to turn up to vote. And I think it's the style of governance that's incredibly important. So it's less about the content and more about the style of how we do things. That's what I would love to see.- [Woman] That was very encouraging and so many good ideas. But I was thinking there are many good ideas that have fallen by the wayside. And when a new idea comes along for say using wind power to create energy, those horrible three bladed bird choppers could easily go out of the way, but there's probably a big interest in saving them because they have a business that's set up around it, but there is a new idea and it's like one pillar with three sides that will take the wind from every quarter. And this is being developed and already expressed, but I can't remember it. So how do you get a good idea, a better idea to overtake a less--- Well, there are a lot of stranded assets in the world is all I can tell you there are, but you have to... I think what we have to become much more adept at is figuring out what are the real gains and the real loss is. And there's a lot of myth busting that has to go on. I'll be very honest with you. I haven't seen too many birds chopped up. However, that's another matter altogether. But what I'm saying is every single technology that comes along will have, of course its naysayers without a doubt. However, having more community, having more understanding at the beginning on this journey and asking how does it contribute to let's say the health of people and the health of the planet, because it's almost like we have a lot of technology foisted on us without that conversation. So let's just roll up the mat and put it over there and think about, well, what are the things that we need to fix? And it is absolutely clear we need to address climate change in every single possible way we can. So I think there's trade offs. I'm not in any way condoning things that need to be taken out of production or taken out offline. But there will be times when society has to catch up with the evidence and the knowledge, but it needs to be shared earlier on. So it's not really a good answer for you, but I think we won't ever... We know when things are really bad for us and we should just take them out of society, like certain drugs and various other things. But there are often contextual reasons why you need to do certain things in certain places. So I'll leave it at that, all right? I scouted out the answer there, didn't I?- Well afraid, that's all we have time for this evening, but thank you very much for that tremendous lecture. Thank you.(audience applauding)