Charles Leadbeater

He spent ten years working for the Financial Times and afterwards in The Independent between 1985 and 1995. In 1998 we won the prestigious David Watt Prize for journalism. Since 1997 he has been an adviser to the Downing Street Policy Unit and the Department of Trade and Industry on the Internet and the knowledge driven economy, helping to shape government policy across a number of fronts. The vision statement he drafted for the Culture Online programme in 2001 predicted the web would become increasingly participative and collaborative. The UK Government has also turned to him for advice on policy issues ranging from health and education to climate change and culture.

He is also a leading advisor to corporations on innovation and the impact of the web. He has advised a long list of companies on innovation strategy, from Ericsson, Accenture, British Telecom, and Microsoft. He is a senior research associate with Demos, the leading London think tank, a visiting Fellow at Oxford’s University Business School and a founder of Participle, the leading public services innovation agency, which is working with public sector agencies to create next generation public services. He is also a visiting fellow at the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, where he has championed ideas of open and user driven innovation.

He published the books We think: Mass innovation, not mass production (2008); Living on Thin Air (1998) which predicted the rise of the internet driven, knowledge economy; and The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur (1997) which was one of the first books to predict social entrepreneurs and social enterprise solutions to public problems would become more compelling.