This post written by Dr. Tuukka Toivonen was first posted on UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity on the 25th of September 2015 http://www.igp.ucl.ac.uk/igp-news-pub/experimenting-carefully. After the recent discovery that around 11 million Volkswagen cars have cheated basic lab emissions tests in the US, it may not seem like the most appropriate time to get excited about high-flying ‘public …
Have you heard of innovation labs yet? A growing range of public, private and civic organisations, from Unicef through Nesta to NHS, now run or support units known as “innovation labs”. The hopeful assumption they share is that labs, by building on openness among other features, can generate promising solutions to grand challenges of complex, systemic nature. … Continue reading
By Vera Petersson and Dr. Tuukka Toivonen. The main aspiration of our fourth ESCies workshop, held on the 21st of November at SOAS, was to get closer to the field and rethink key ‘entrepreneurial spaces and collectivities’ concepts in light of presented evidence. We enjoyed short presentations from members on a range of topics, from … Continue reading
Use of the term “hub” has certainly been inflationary in discussions about innovation and entrepreneurship support. I believe that innovation hubs are a genuinely new (and exciting!) organizational form, but at the same time, “hub” has become a misnomer for many organizations where the label doesn’t quite fit, especially across Africa. This wouldn’t be such … Continue reading
There is no such a thing called Entrepreneurial Spaces and Collectivities (ESCies) directly in Chinese. The most approximate thing I can imagine is social incubators in China, if we exclude various commercial incubators and high-tech innovation labs. In China, social incubator is the counterpart of the Impact Hub. By the middle of 2013, there are … Continue reading
Please find below a snippet of an article written by Tuukka Toivonen and Nicolas Friederici for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. For the full article, click the link below. Continue reading
Is the future to be celebrated or dreaded? The beauty of Nesta’s 3rd FutureFest conference was that it tried hard to err neither on the side of exuberant techno-optimism nor on that of gloomy doomsday scenarios. Continue reading
This summer, SOAS will run its first full-fledged summer school on social entrepreneurship (6-24 July). While focusing predominantly on the design of ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’ innovations, this programme will also examine the special role of hubs and labs. Continue reading
In the past months there have been many initiatives trying to map out all innovation hubs and labs in SSA. Some crowdsource maps powered by Bongohive, InfoDev and others have identified over 100 tech hubs and labs in the region. These initiatives provide with a categorization including incubators, accelerators, tech hubs, co-working spaces, and so on. The ‘mapping’ of … Continue reading
Originally posted on spaceandorganisation:
Collaboration is one of the most ubiquitous buzzwords in the modern business world. Collaboration is everywhere. Companies want their staff to collaborate more. Workspaces are designed to support collaboration. You’re frowned upon if you publish an academic paper on your own. Why didn’t you collaborate? Does no one like working with…
Something curious yet strangely familiar took place in Osaka, Japan, towards the early spring of 2012: A small group of like-minded university students, post-docs, architects, designers, film-makers and social entrepreneurs decided to launch a community for young people interested in social innovation. Surprised by the popularity of their first two free-form meetings, the founders followed … Continue reading
ESCies 