Posted By
Andrew Sissons
28 October 2011
At the end of October, the world’s population will officially reach 7 billion. Two hundred years ago, at the birth of the industrial revolution, there were roughly 1 billion people on the planet, and this doubled to 2 billion over the next century. The last increase of a billion has taken just 12 years, an extraordinary growth rate.
This remarkable population explosion poses a series of daunting global challenges. How can we provide food and water for all these extra people?
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Posted By
Jason Edwards
14 October 2011
The French Room in The Midland is often the venue for exquisite and luxurious dining in one of Manchester’s finest hotels.
Yet the dinner suits were firmly off as the panel got down to discussing the pressing issues facing the British economy and the need to ‘innovate’ if the country is to pull out of another near recession.
The third and final Big Innovation Centre fringe debate took place at the Conservative Party Conference with a high profile panel of experts from the private, educational and public policy sectors. .
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Posted By
Tony Raven
13 October 2011
The big guns of UK innovation - Cable, Willetts, Hutton, Hauser and a Who's Who of the innovation community - were out in Islington on Tuesday for the fourth annual Technology Strategy Board flagship event, Innovate 11. From a tentative start back in 2008, this year's event had a real buzz about it. The main stage set pieces were lightly attended in general but many of the more focussed satellite sessions were sta
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Posted By
Andrew Sissons
04 October 2011
The financial crisis has left behind many lessons for developed economies. Among the most widely accepted is the need for advanced economies to re-balance towards manufacturing and other export-intensive activities, reversing decades of relative decline in manufacturing.
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Posted By
Andrew Sissons
03 October 2011
George Osborne’s speech to the Conservative conference was heavy on intellectual content, but light on detail. He set out a weighty defence of his tough fiscal strategy, and made much of his “monetary activism”, promising to keep the supply of credit flowing to businesses and households. But he made much less of another, equally important theme: how to help British businesses develop and make money out of new ideas. Despite his promise to help the “innovators”, there was little detail in his speech – beyond a couple of extremely valuable funding announcements – on how he might do this.
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