I work with entrepreneurs, governments, cities, and foundations to generate innovation with public purpose.

Which is my agent’s way of saying that I am a kind of intellectual odd-job man.

I went to the Vyne Comprehensive School in Basingstoke, emerging with five mediocre O levels and a clutch of outright failures. I was saved by doing my retakes at a very good local sixth form college, Queen Mary’s, from where, somehow, I persuaded Balliol College, Oxford to give me a scholarship to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. I had to look up the college’s name in the town library before applying.

I enjoyed university so much that I neglected to think about what I would do when it ended. Lacking any better ideas, I became a journalist on a monthly magazine called Safety, writing about health and safety at work.

After a mixed spell as a researcher at TV-am, the breakfast television station, I made it onto Weekend World, the ITV current affairs programme, researching set-piece interviews with politicians. I was never quite sure about television: people were prepared to say virtually anything when the lights went on.

From there I moved to the Financial Times to pursue my original idea of being a print journalist. When I joined, in 1985, the paper was still printed with hot metal on presses in the basement; when I left ten years later we were on the verge of the digital age. I joined when Mrs Thatcher was in her pomp. I went down coal mines in Wales, toured tractor factories in the Soviet Union and car plants in Detroit.

Throughout I led a kind of double life: in the evenings I would write lengthy articles for Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of the British Communist party, on what the left should make of individualism, globalisation and Thatcherism. I spent the weekends in fierce debate with former Stalinists. I was cast as a Euro-communist, without ever being sure what that meant.

In 1991 I arrived in Japan, seeking to understand the economic and industrial miracle which had fascinated me for the previous few years. The economy promptly descended into a decades-long slump. Just before I left for Tokyo I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife: Geraldine. A correspondence of incredibly long faxes ensued before I beat a retreat. Soon after arriving back in London I joined The Independent, the youngest, bravest and most vulnerable national newspaper. It was shaky but exciting.

I learned a lot there too, mainly about the obvious limits to my capacity as an editor. My chief contribution was to commission Helen Fielding to write the column which became the Bridget Jones’s Diary phenomenon.

By the end of my time at the Independent I had a corner office and a swanky title; I worked a 70-hour week for people for whom I had little respect and saw Geraldine and the kids for a few minutes at the beginning and end of each day. I would go to sleep reading holiday brochures, dreaming of escape.

So that is what I did.

Thanks to a redundancy pay-off which was enough to keep us going for a few months, I decided to dispense with a title, start working from a desk in our bedroom and only on projects I thought were interesting, with interesting people. I had no idea what I was doing. I knew that I did not want to manage people, let alone be managed by someone, and I didn’t want to be defined by a job title, a position in a hierarchy.

It was 1996, before home working had become commonplace. I’d call it a portfolio career, except at times it felt like it was careering out of control.

I wrote a couple of books that have sold pretty well - Living on Thin Air and We-Think - and one or two which deservedly disappeared without trace. I have given Ted Talks that have been watched millions of times and addressed cavernous auditoriums with only a handful of bemused people in the front row.

Over the ensuing 25-plus years I have done a wide variety of odd jobs all over the world, mainly trying to promote new ideas for education, cities, public services, work and social care. This website brings together some of what I have produced in that time.

I have written far too many reports for think tanks and foundations, such as Demos, Nesta, the Centre for London and The Australian Centre for Social Innovation. This site archives what I think are the most interesting, from the Rise of the Social Entrepreneur, the first thing I wrote at my desk in my bedroom, to When Love Meets Power, published 25 years later when Covid hit.

I wrote speeches, white papers and strategies for the New Labour government of Tony Blair, working closely with David Miliband and Peter Mandelson in various roles. The centre of government was defined by a stagnant urgency: everything was urgent but nothing much ever changed.

In an effort to turn ideas into action, I co-founded the design agency Participle and more recently Alt Now, which is closely linked to my work as co-lead of the System Innovation Initiative at the Rockwool Foundation in Copenhagen, my central focus at the moment.

I am proud to have been the founder chair of the digital education programme Apps for Good. Amongst other things I am a trustee of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a visiting professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and a life-fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

And along the way Geraldine and I have built a house in London, renovated one in Greece, brought up four children and become doting grandparents.

I want to thank the people too numerous to mention from whom I have learned (and borrowed) so much. By far the most impressive people I’ve met are innovative practitioners - head teachers, police officers, doctors - who are trying to turn bold ideas into practical action for public good. I’ve learned that small can be big when ideas reshape entire systems; the most powerful ideas are unusual combinations, and those combinations usually get made by curious people working in what are often dismissed as peripheral niches on the edges of larger systems. Do not go to those niches if you want wealth or status; however that is where ideas that will change the world will first take root. Here’s to the power of the periphery, the desk in the bedroom, the career with no direction, and the job with no title.