Lab Notes - December edition

The December edition of Lab Notes brings together inspiring blogs, articles and other content for public sector and social innovators around the world, including a report on the potential for India's circular economy, case studies and tools for designing public services, a new model for development aid, and more... 

This month's key lab picks

1. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation's latest report explores how applying circular economy principles could benefit India's economy, environment and citizens.

2. Which ‘bold’ urban innovation policies are providing the potential for scalable impact? This report and map from NYU Wagner and the Centre for an Urban Future gives 15 global examples from São Paulo to Malang.

3. Disrupting the system from within: In the wake of South African protests around unequal access to education, Dr. Francois Bonnici (University of Cape Town) is set to bring social impact education off-campus with a new programme and a free Coursera Social Innovation course.

4. This new Design For Europe guide from Nesta and IDEO offers a range of case studies, tools and methods to use design thinking to drive quality in the public sector.

5. What measures can city governments use to safeguard against public data about vulnerable people falling into the wrong hands? Read The Verge for more.

6. The city government in Tirana, Albania is making the public a full partner in the campaign to tackle acute traffic congestion and air pollution.

7. This Guardian article makes the case for ‘community philanthropy’ as a development model to rebuke the ‘beneficiary’ mentality of traditional aid approaches.

8. Can more participatory institutions improve the quality of governance? Read the transcript from Beth Noveck’s recent London talk on crowdsourcing, expertise and the future of democracy.

9. An experiment involving speech analysis of rural Uganda’s most popular broadcast medium ‒ radio ‒ is being used to understand the concerns and opinions of people in hard-to-reach areas. Read more about the UN project from National Public Radio.

10. Nesta’s Geoff Mulgan highlights crowdteaching and blockchain among four trends likely to transform the delivery of higher education. Read the GovInsider article andaccompanying paper.

11. Stephen King of the Omidyar Network highlights a roadmap for how and why open governance should move forward in a time of uncertainty about its priority on the political agenda.

12. Eric von Hippel’s new book describes a new theory of ‘Free Innovation’, outlining the social value and increasing reward of open-source user-innovation, driven by the decreasing cost of powerful design and communications technologies.