Nick’s Blog
Video games + behaviour change
March 5, 2014, 2 Comments
Video games don’t normally get a good rap when it comes to the health of young people. Instinctively, replacing hours of playing outside with friends for hours of solo screen staring or battling with virtual ogres controlled by middle aged men in Shanghai doesn’t seem like a good swap for millions of young people. At […]
Street Food for social change: why gourmet hipsters are just part of the story
January 27, 2014, 2 Comments
If you walk a few hundred metres west from Old Street roundabout, the new hub of London’s tech start up culture, you hit Whitecross Street, which, at lunchtime five days a week, is bustling with queues of people waiting for some of the best street food in London. Burritos from Luardo’s or classic Roman-style food […]
‘The simple habits and reciprocities of everyday life.’
November 27, 2013, No Comments
This is how David Halpern describes the focus of work that examines and values the role of social capital in our communities. This warm, insightful phrase is a world away from the normal vocabulary of government, despite depicting pretty much everything that affects and is affected by government. Basic, daily human interaction and cooperation shape our communities, […]
Progress still battles prejudice when it comes to mental health
August 29, 2013, 2 Comments
In April this year, as part of our three-year partnership with the Nominet Trust, we set out on 12 months of research and development around mental illness, which is the largest single burden of disease in the UK, with a massive human and social cost, as well as an estimated economic cost of £105 billion a […]
Our obsession with chicken shops
June 3, 2013, No Comments
Earlier this year, I wrote about our early obesity research, through which we started looking at the way that the food landscape of modern Britain, particularly in poorer urban areas, generates unhealthy eating behaviours by default. cigars buy online So toxic is this landscape, that the levels of recommended exercise just can’t possibly compete (150 […]
5 reasons why business models suit behaviour change
April 9, 2013, No Comments
Business models don’t suit every social mission.As Dan Pallotta says in his March 2013 TED Talk, “social business needs markets and there are some issues for which you just can’t develop the kind of money measures that you need for a market.” how to grow your penis However, there is a really good fit between […]
Prompting, nudging and facilitating less food waste
March 5, 2013, No Comments
Every year in the UK, we throw away almost 20% of the food we buy, which contributes to the even scarier estimate from the IME that between 30% and 50% of the food produced worldwide is lost or wasted. We also tend underestimate the environmental impact of this waste. For example, we imagine that our […]
Real corporate responsibility is about making less money
January 22, 2013, No Comments
2012 wasn’t a good year for corporate responsibility. write my paper As society continued to reel from the effects of the global recession, created by unprecedented corporate corruption, greed and willful ineptitude in the financial sector, we were met with a large, unerring middle finger from most of the corporate world. In April, WALMART, the […]
He Has Done a Lot for Charity
October 24, 2012, 2 Comments
Last week’s Livestrong 15th Anniversary event in Austin, Texas, looked like an odd occasion. Everyone there seemed pretty sure that they were still doing a good thing, but there an was inevitable discomfort about the context of the overwhelming revelations of the USADA’s report on Lance Armstrong’s doping behaviours. “If Lance doped, that certainly takes […]
Overweight by default
September 20, 2012, 1 Comment
We’ve spent a good chunk of the last year looking at how our approach to behaviour change can play a role in the profound problem of obesity. We all know what this problem looks like by now. Over a quarter of adults in the UK are classified as obese and 2 out of 3 are […]
I’m Still a Plastic Bag
August 22, 2012, 4 Comments
Our 2007 I’m Not a Plastic Bag project with Anya Hindmarch was, at the time, hugely successful. We applied our product-centric approach to develop something practical and useful, injected fashion and celebrity to increase its appeal, and got a massive, mainstream audience very excited about it. In turn, we helped successfully mainstream a previously niche behaviour, taking […]
The end of volunteering
July 23, 2012, 4 Comments
best places to buy cigars online People supporting their communities and making meaningful contributions to society without being paid is something that we all want loads more of. It’s human beings at their cooperative, collaborative best and it happens all over the place, everyday, through informal activities that are built naturally into healthy communities and relationships. […]
Us and the Other Us
June 15, 2012, 3 Comments
As part of our ongoing research on the Incidental Effect, we’re working our way through another huge array of books, papers and lectures across all sorts of areas, from product development to behavioural economics to social psychology. Very often and fairly obviously, the concepts and ideas overlap, repeating in different forms from source to source. […]
Enjoyable things for local communities to do together
April 18, 2012, 3 Comments
The After the Riots report from the Riots Communities and Victims Panel was a really good example of how to emerge from something painful with something simple, positive and practical. buy cheap cigarettes In plain language, it’s insightful and creative with few assumptions or judgments. We particularly liked the advice for the police to look at […]
Digital inclusion is ideal for an incidental approach
March 27, 2012, No Comments
In the middle of three new launches of our Internet Buttons project into Ireland, Poland and Holland, we’ve been struck, again, by the need for useful tools like this all across Europe. Our UK Internet Buttons, launched last year and developed in partnership with the Nominet Trust, has been used in all sorts of environments to […]
The response to ‘Kony 2012’ has been amazing, but it’s not an example to follow
March 18, 2012, 4 Comments
When the Kony 2012 video first popped up on my Facebook wall and I started to watch it, I only got a few minutes in. “Who are you to end a war?” asks Invisible Children’s Director, Jason Russell, of a star struck teenage girl, “Who are you not to?”, was, specifically, the point I got to […]
The nudge potential of mobile payments
March 6, 2012, 4 Comments
Starbucks Corp CEO, Howard Schultz, described the arrival of mobile payments as part of a “seismic change” in consumer behaviour. For Starbucks, which is leagues ahead of any other high street retailer in taking advantage of the technology, this change has proved extremely profitable and earlier this year they reported record revenues as a result. The […]
Too important to make lots of money from
February 26, 2012, 1 Comment
I’ve had lots of e-mails, tweets and a few calls from journalists asking for a bit more explanation on something I said on The World Today on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday night. Charlotte Ashton from Radio 4, as part of her series on British social enterprises, asked whether it should be acceptable for social […]
A bit of new radicalism
February 19, 2012, 1 Comment
It has been gre Ex Wife Getting Back Together at for We Are What We Do to be included in the Britain’s New Radicals list, launched today by The Observer and NESTA. We obviously understand that this kind of list has to be representative, rather than comprehensive, and there have already been plenty more people […]
Facebook “built to accomplish a social mission”
February 5, 2012, 3 Comments
Playing social change
January 30, 2012, 3 Comments
Despite being i Does Your Ex Boyfriend Wants You Back Quiz nterested from a distance for some time, we have only just started to explore the potential of gaming to affect social change and, like many before us, found this potential to be almost endless. One of the influences behind this new work has been […]
Customer service can change the world
January 12, 2012, No Comments
We’ve just started working with Sky on some internal leadership events that they run each year and, once again, my budding obsession with the social power of customer service has been given another prod. Sky has 10 million customers and 6,000 customer service agents. Sainsbury’s, one of our other close partners, has 20 million customers […]
‘Tis the season for serious guilt
December 31, 2011, 8 Comments
It’s this time of year that our TVs are overrun with unmissable deals on three piece suites and all inclusive holidays. Most of it is pretty annoying, but pretty easy to tune out of. Less easy to tune out of is the barrage of fundraising appeals for Africa and this year they seem to be […]
The Paralympics: positive or negative incidental effects on inclusion?
December 16, 2011, 8 Comments
Sally Richards is the mother of Jackson West, a young, Canberra-based entrepreneur with a disability, and I was lucky enough to have her as part a group of around 200 people at the We Are What We Do workshop organised by Disability ACT and BLITS last week in the Australian capital. This audience are all […]
The Incidental Effect
December 12, 2011, 14 Comments
Hello. This first one is going to be very short, because what it refers to is quite long and I don’t want you to get fed up before you get there. This month, we’ve launched the draft of our new approach paper – The Incidental Effect – which aims to start some conversations about new […]