What drives entrepreneurship?

At the Learning Launchpad, we support entrepreneurial ideas that create change and innovation across the UK education landscape. Our investees are creative, innovative and driven individuals that often lead us to ask ourselves the question “what drives entrepreneurship?” Recent studies have shown that a country’s social, cultural and political contexts must foster the environment and [...]

Reflections on Shine

Just back from SHINE, the third annual unconference for social entrepreneurs: hundreds of social entrepreneurs, investors and supporters brought together by events producers germination and partners including UnLtd and School for Social Entrepreneurs. Swiftly following an incredibly inspiring presentation from Alexander Osterwalder that drew on the design process behind the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, my [...]

Success through Social Impact

I went to a really great workshop event today, Success through Social Impact, held jointly by Social Enterprise London (SEL) and Social Firms UK.  I initially thought that social impact measurement would be an incredibly dry topic but the event really changed that perception.  It can be a daunting and slightly theoretical task, but when [...]

Get the kids to pay?

I had a bit thought last night at an event that I went along to with my colleagues Cynthia and Rajni. The event was held to drum up UK interest in the work of Acumen Fund – a global social investment fund that supports social enterprises in India, Pakistan and Kenya to scale up their [...]

Learning isn’t learning

The gap between what our education system provides children and what children need to develop their full potential has widened hugely over the past 20 years. The world economy is changing fast – children who are at school now will need initiative, resourcefulness and the ability to adapt if they are to excel in the [...]

A Supermarket Education?

Should schools rid themselves of paperwork and bureaucracy, and take up the Tesco model of running things? Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of the country’s largest employer, Tesco, recently spoke to the Guardian about the ‘woefully low’ standards of British education.  Leahy is one of many business leaders who think educators could learn a thing [...]

Lessons from Lisbon

We’re back after a great Social Innovation eXchange Summer School in Lisbon, hosted at the amazing Gulbenkian Foundation, one of the world’s greatest foundations with an outstanding contribution to art and social innovation. Among the many, many things we learned, we wanted to share some lessons and some links: – there is a lot of [...]