CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
£5K TO £10K
EXTERNAL LINKS
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WIKIPEDIA
TOPICS
Bus. Competitiveness, IT & Online Business
SPEECH TITLES
The rise of mass innovation
Knowledge entrepreneurship
How corporations can become as agile as small companies
BIOGRAPHY
Charles Leadbeater is an ideas generator, strategist and adviser to leading European companies. Hailed as one of the world's top management thinkers, he is an authority on innovation and competition.
Reportedly Tony Blair's favourite corporate thinker, Charles advised the Downing Street Policy Unit and the DTI on the knowledge driven economy. He drafted White Papers on competition, science and communications, advised the BBC on charter renewal, and worked with Channel Four on its digital strategy.
Charles is a senior advisor on competitiveness to the European Commission. He brings a global perspective, built on extensive research in Silicon Valley, Finland, China and India. His books Go Barefoot and Up The Down Escalator explore what he calls the 'mass innovation' economy, and show how successful companies adopt evolutionary models of innovation.
In We-think Charles explores the new phenomenon of mass creativity exemplified by web sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace. He argues that participation, rather than consumption or production, will be the key organising idea of future society.
Charles Leadbeater was listed by GQ as one of the 30 Most Powerful Men in Britain. This might have attracted interest from Bridget Jones, whose diary he jointly devised with Helen Fielding as Assistant Features Editor at The Independent.
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WE-THINK: MASS INNOVATION, NOT MASS PRODUCTION
by Charles Leadbeater
We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.
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Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.
It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.
But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.
It leaves us more open to abuse and invasions of privacy.
Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.
Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.
Everywhere we turn there will be struggles between people who want to freely share - music, films, ideas, information - and those who want to control this activity, either corporations who want to make money or governments who fear debate and democracy. This conflict between the rising surge of mass collaboration and attempts to retain top down control will be one of the defining battles of our time, from Communist China, to Microsoft's battle with open source and the music industry's desperate rearguard action against the web.