Geoff Mulgan Government Quotations

All over the world, social innovation is tackling some of the most pressing problems facing society today - from fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming and waste reduction to restorative justice and zero-carbon housing. But most of these are growing despite, not because of, help from governments.

Local government in England is simply too big. Our lowest tier serves an average population of 118,500, while in the U.S. and across continental Europe the figures are more like several thousand.

The responsibility for good government lies not just with governments themselves but also with every other part of the system they operate in, including media, non-governmental organisations and the public.

Governments that invest billions in new hardware still find it hard to accept that they might benefit just as much from systematic innovation in such things as child development or cutting crime.

Many people leave government disillusioned about its ability to achieve change and cynical about politicians. I left with rather opposite lessons.

Europe has shown how government can be organised in a network. Its institutions both compete and co-operate and include a directly elected parliament that does not appoint the executive, independent judiciaries and a complex set of relationships between the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament.

As a civil servant in charge of the government's Strategy Unit, I brought in many people from outside government, including academia and science, to work in the unit, dissecting and solving complex problems from GM crops to alcohol, nuclear proliferation to schools reform.

The City of London has never been known for understanding technology and has never matched Silicon Valley's tradition of knowledgeable investment in technology start-ups, just as the U.K. government has never matched the vast investment made by the U.S. government.

A lot of people in government don't really read books at all.