NESTA POLICY BREAKFAST with Fred Steward – Tuesday 29th April 2008

NESTA Provocation – Breaking the boundaries: transformative innovation for the global good 

‘The climate change crisis is the product of many generations, but overcoming it must be the great project of this generation’ – Prime Minister Gordon Brown, speech to the Foreign Press Association, 19 November 2007 

In the seventh of NESTA's Provocations, Fred Steward (NESTA Visiting Fellow and Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Brunel University) presents a vision of how we can deal with the threat of climate change.  How?  By making environmental sustainability a national goal and supporting innovation to meet this end.  He uses examples such as the rise of the welfare state which contains lessons that could prove to hold more substantial relevance to policymakers than heroic accounts of revolutionary technical change.

‘The term 'radical innovation' implies a high degree of novelty in either technology or functionality compared with incremental innovation.  However, it refers to a specific product, process or practice.  Transformative innovation is about radical change of a more generic kind.  It is about the implementation of paradigm breaking, system wide novelty. Transformative innovation involves substantive risky investments by its champions, conflicts between emergent and incumbent actors, and reconfiguring of traditional sectoral and policy boundaries.’ 

To find out more and to take part in the conversation, please join us at this launch event for what we are sure will be a stimulating and thought-provoking debate.  Full breakfast will be provided. 

When: Tuesday 29th April, 8.00am – 9.30am 

Where: NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE

NESTA's monthly Policy Breakfasts aim to strengthen the innovation policy community and foster debate and new ideas.  

Fred Steward

Fred Steward is Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Brunel University, and a Visiting Professor at Imperial College. He also directed the ESRC Research Programme on Sustainable Technologies between 2004 and 2007.  With a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Manchester University, Fred has researched and taught innovation theory and practice in the business schools of Manchester, Aston and Brunel. 

His personal research focuses on socio-technical transitions to sustainability. Research projects and publications have addressed innovation and sustainability in relation to 'info', 'bio' and 'nano' technologies.  He has advised on innovation policy in the UK, European Commission and China, and is currently on the Scientific Committee of the Dutch KSI system innovation programme and the European SCORE sustainable consumption programme. As a Visiting Fellow at NESTA from October 2007 to September 2008, Fred aims to promote a new policy framework for innovation and sustainability in synergy with the Policy & Research Unit's broader agenda on innovation. 

NESTA's Policy & Research Unit

The NPRU aims to help transform the UK's capacity for innovation by: 

*  Building a relevant and coherent policy and research programme that resonates with national priorities, political realities, media interest and the research frontier 

*  Integrating policy goals within all NESTA programmes – using research to design programmes, and using the evidence base created by programmes to drive policy development 

*  Establishing a strong policy and research community around innovation