I was in town this morning for a very productive meeting with a friend who’s a local GP to help me explore potential opportunities for social enterprises (aka #socent on Twitter) if GPs end up directly commissioning services.

We’d spotted earlier in the day that Billy Bragg was going to be at Occupy Leeds in City Square at midday, so we wandered across after our meeting finished.

I love Billy Bragg.  I think kids in 50 years time will study his lyrics in the way that we studied war poets.  And there is a coherence and clarity to his view of the world which I find hugely inspiring (even though I’m the first to admit I’m not a socialist).  So it was good to hear a few songs and listen to what he had to say about the importance of the Occupy movement.

It was the first time I’ve been down to Occupy Leeds.  I took a passing interest when Occupy Wall Street started, and got a bit more interested when people attempted to occupy the London Stock Exchange.  But it really caught my  imagination when the protest moved to the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.

I thought the symbolism was brilliant, and could immediately see how moving the protest to the steps of a Christian church was likely to lead to something quite interesting.  But of course I couldn’t have anticipated how much it would shake up the hierarchy at St Paul’s and in the wider Church.

I’m a conflicted, uncomfortable Roman Catholic, born into a Catholic family.  I wouldn’t actively choose to be a Catholic now, but it’s the tradition I’ve been brought up in and it’s where, in lots of ways, I belong.  I also value in some ways the sense of discomfort that it brings me.  But I have no time for the hierarchy of the Church, and I struggle with a lot of its teaching.  Yet I find a niche within it – informed mainly by my year in Ecuador with a social project steeped in liberation theology - that keeps me hanging in there.

It was my patchy understanding of liberation theology that sparked my interest in the protest at St Paul’s.   I was pretty sure that Jesus would be outside in one of the tents, sitting with the people whose demands may be incoherent but who are saying something profound about social justice.  I also thought that the kind of church leader who inspires me – someone like the assassinated Archbishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero - would be out there with them too.

So that was my way in to the Occupy movement. But I’d be lying if I said I felt that I was part of that movement.  When I was down at City Square this afternoon I found it too easy to tell myself that the people there – camping, speaking, waving banners were people not like me.  I accept that’s not particularly helpful, but it was my honest response.  Got a beard?  Probably not like me.  Read Socialist Worker?  Not like me.  Look vaguely “alternative” in any of the ways that we like to compartmentalise other people?  Not like me. Got a desire to camp outside in the freezing cold at City Square?  Not like me. And there were lots of people there who, I told myself privately, were “not like me”.

But I think that’s the challenge, both to me and to the rest of us – both those who do currently feel totally part of the Occupy movement – and those like me who are intrigued by it and who see how important it is at this moment in time.  And that’s why I think the We Are The 99% slogan is so clever and so powerful.  Because in my opinion we – the vast majority of the world who are at the mercy of modern capitalism (and the vast majority of the world are doing far worse out of it than I am) – need to see that all of us are ill-served by the current economic system.  There has to be a better way.  If we don’t find one, the only question will be whether it’s economic collapse or environmental catastrophe that gets us first.

So I think with time we need to all see ourselves as the 99% – a diverse, engaged and not so engaged, political and apolitical, religious and non-religious, “alternative” and “mainstream” group of people.  So, speaking personally, I can be part of a movement that aims to make the world a much better place than it currently is.  Me, with my lack of political upbringing, my complicated relationship with Christianity, my lack of desire to take part in protests, my interest in finding business opportunities that deliver social change, my pragmatism, and my messy contradictions.  I see myself as part of the 99 per cent now.  Do you?

Money is tight in the world of social business.  Our city-centre office (which to be honest was a bargain – courtesy of this social enterprise) is no more. There’s just no slack in any of our contracts for anything that is a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.

So we hotdesk with fellow social business Angels Housekeeping, and I work from home a fair bit more.

Working from home has its advantages.  You save a fortune on coffee and sandwiches.  From a green perspective, I bet we’re wasting less food – any leftovers from last night’s tea tend to be recycled into a worker’s lunch.  And my commute up the stairs is pretty carbon free.  Although I’ll soon need a new pair of slippers.

But there are dangers too.  Not just daytime television.  But knocks at the door.  I had one such knock on the door yesterday.  Someone from Scottish Power greeting me by name.  Not my name – that of the previous occupiers.  He was in the area, just “checking up” on things, or something nice and helpful like that.  That’s when it all started to go a bit odd.  He told me that “they’d taken over supply of this area”.  Obviously this is ridiculous and I told him so.  He said that’s what he’d been told – and then he said that they’d become the main generator of energy for the area.  Clearly another load of nonesense.

I cut the conversation short. I was incredulous.  You hear about this kind of thing, but I never imagined that anyone would offer up such blatant untruths.  I tweeted about it, did a bit of googling and eventually ended up chatting to Trading Standards.  At one stage it sounded like they were about to send out a SWAT team to intercept him (they asked if “there is any vulnerability in the area”) but in the end they said they’d just pass it on to Trading Standards in Scottish Power’s home town, Glasgow.  I wasn’t to expect a follow-up call.

I didn’t think that was good enough to be honest.  The reason I was so angry about it is that we do a lot of work with older people’s groups – and they’re always telling us about older people’s better nature being taken advantage of by dodgy sales tactics.  I’ve seen it in my own family with double glazing and financial products.  Carefully crafted patter which disarms many of us – and in particular older people, but which has only one goal – a sale, whether it’s in the best interests of the customer or not.

I searched the #scottishpower hashtag on Twitter – and found out that Scottish Power had just announced that they were going to end door-to-door sales – but not just yet.  They plan to finish encouraging people to switch suppliers through door-to-door tactics at the end of November.

Consumer organisation Which? (of which I’m a member) picked up on my story and wrote about it today.  They’re following this up with Scottish Power and hopefully they’ll take some action.  To be honest I can’t understand why they can’t just end this practice now.  If it’s no longer appropriate on 1st December, I’d say it’s not appropriate today.  How many more people will end up on a tariff which is potentially not right for them – just in time for the winter – thanks to similar tactics?

I’m not a great fan of a lot of big businesses, particularly those that appear to be doing pretty well out of us at a time when most of us are feeling the pinch. But I’m certainly not in the “all big businesses that make profits are bad” camp.  But when, time and again, the big six power companies have been criticised for misleading sales tactics, I find it hard to understand why they don’t just sort themselves out.  Either, you might assume, they’re badly-run businesses (possibly) or they care about short-term shareholder value more than they care about their customers (that’d be my gut feeling).

Let’s hope I’m wrong.  Maybe they’ll show some leadership and end these sales tactics now, instead of waiting until the end of November.

We had an interesting round table discussion with two of the leading thinkers and do-ers in the worlds of social enterprise and mental health yesterday – Mark Brown and David Floyd.

Mark is editor of leading mental health magazine One in Four, whilst David runs Social Spider – the social enterprise, which, amongst other things, publishes One in Four.  David also writes what in my opinion is the best UK blog on social enterprise, Beanbags and Bullsh!t.  Well worth a read if you want an honest, front-line take on the world of social business.

We’d invited Mark and David to Leeds because we’ve been chatting to various people over the last few months about exploring new ways to support people with a mental health need.  And, just as importantly, exploring ways that people can help themselves.  Mark and David had written a thinkpiece about the potential for a Big Society approach to helping people to improve people’s mental health – so we were keen to hear more.  The thinkpiece is excellent (but not available online yet) and yesterday’s discussion was fascinating.

I’m no expert in the field of mental health – I’m just someone who cares about this stuff and is interested in trying to work out how to do things better.  But it strikes me that some of the things that can contribute to a person’s improved mental health and sense of wellbeing could include:

• Active involvement in the development and delivery of the support that they receive and the opportunity to influence things (you might call that co-production)
• Support from and contact with peers – people who are – or who have been – in a similar situation – with an emphasis on self-help and peer support
• Appropriate, non-institutionalised, personalised services
• A sense that they matter – they’re not just a statistic in a faceless world of health and social care

So, with that in mind, you can imagine how an approach – which you might call Big Society – could work.  People setting things up themselves to support eachother.  Local charities and social enterprises setting up services which are funded through contracts and charges to paying customers.  All sounds great doesn’t it?

Except the discussion yesterday – whilst highlighting the potential of a Big Society approach – also emphasised the barriers that are in place if more of this stuff is to happen.  Fundamentally, it comes down to money.  Where is the money in the mental  health field?  Much of it stays within the NHS and the local authority.  Some of it goes out through contracts – to deliver pre-determined outcomes, tightly monitored through Key Performance Indicators.  And a bit of it – if you’re lucky – might go on innovative, local, risky, do-it-yourself initiatives.

And please don’t tell me that Personal Budgets could fund this kind of thing.  They could – in theory – and should.  But our experience – and increasing amounts of evidence such as this report into Personal Budget pilots in Scotland – suggest that few people with a mental health need are getting support which is different in a meaningful way through a Personal Budget.

Locally, we’re hearing that the local authority will approve a Personal Budget to cover someone’s transport costs to get to an activity (which could be a Big Society, DIY, self-help/peer support activity) – but they won’t pay for the activity itself.  So how is the service supposed to develop?  And, given that many people with a mental health need are on pretty minimal benefits, they will tend to struggle to pay for that activity.

Solutions?  I doubt there are any quick fixes.  But, as always, the starting point needs to be an honest assessment of where things are.  Big Society approaches aren’t going to magically spring up out of thin air.  If the State decides that more of this kind of thing should happen, then we need to invest in it.  In Leeds we’ve made a start with the Ideas That Change Lives investment fund, which has teamed up with UnLtd to offer support to people with good ideas.  It’s a good start, but we need plenty more.

We ran a seminar with Adult Social Care at Leeds City Council yesterday exploring the idea of timebanking.

If you’ve not come across timebanking before, you can find out more on this Scoop.It site that we’ve put together – or by visiting the Timebanking UK website. You can also find out more about Just Add Spice – whose co-director, Tris Dyson, spoke at our seminar yesterday. In essence, it’s about give and take. People offer time to eachother, and get credits in return – which can be used to buy in the time of someone else in the timebank.

If you were to look inside my head you would discover the remnants of a lifetime of discussions between my sceptical self and my idealist self. I love the values behind timebanking. The idea of helping people to focus on what they can offer, as well as what they need. The concept of everyone’s time being of equal value. The importance of putting some kind of value on the social capital which makes life worth living.

But I worry that it’s one of those things which is much better in theory than it is in practice. My worry isn’t about people abusing the system – taking and not giving, or perhaps even stealing. Instead my concern is that people won’t take enough. They’ll give for a while – and then not get round to taking. For timebanking to work, we need people who are willing to accept help and support – as well as people are happy to give it.

There was a lot of discussion yesterday about how a timebank would work – in particular focusing on the role of the broker – the person who will help to ensure that people give and take. The impression I get is that in most cases we have to aim for a fairly light-touch broker, for two reasons. One is that there isn’t much money about – so we’ll struggle to sustain any timebanks which rely too much on paid staff.

Secondly, I think part of the attraction of timebanking is its DIY nature. I fear for timebanks which end up with a broker housed within a third sector or public sector organisation – unless that broker sees their role as that of a catalyst – moving on – or at least stepping back – once things are running smoothly. We really don’t need brokers who feel they need to cover their backs by routinely getting everyone to have CRB checks for example.

I’m not gung-ho about safety concerns, but I think part of the value of timebanking is the opportunity it gives us to start taking some responsibility – and making our own decisions about whether we want to accept a service from someone. I think there’s far more danger in communities that don’t talk to eachother than there is in connected communities where people are dealing with eachother on a more regular basis.

But as I say, the scepticism – and the desire to work out what might stop timebanking from working in Leeds – is balanced by a real sense of what it could achieve. There were various ideas discussed yesterday – from simple neighbourhood (person to person) based timebanks, run on a voluntary basis, to slightly more involved ones, (often agency to person) where people might be able to redeem credits not just for services from within the timebank, but for services from the local authority, or local businesses. So an hour at a Housing Association consultation might be exchanged for an hour at the local council swimming baths – which needs more customers to survive. Or a local coffee shop might want to acknowledge the efforts of local volunteers by allowing for a time-limited exchange of credits for coffee and cake.

But isn’t that going against the very nature of volunteering? There’s a discussion to be had about that I think, but my own take is that we need to lose this idea that volunteering is all about selfless giving. Self-interest – what’s in it for me – is an important part of the reasoning behind giving. If people give more because they’re acknowledged, and get something in return, then in my opinion that’s no bad thing.

Personally, I’m most intrigued by the anecdotal evidence I’m hearing time and again of the impact timebanking can have on improving people’s mental health. It makes a lot of sense. I know myself – you probably do too – that one of the best ways of dragging myself out of occasional dark places is to do something for someone else, to be reminded that I have skills to give and have a value to others. There’s far more to better mental health than that, but it could be a starting point for some.

I’ll write more about this in the future – but in the meantime, if you’re in Leeds and you’re interested in exploring timebanking more please get in touch. The Ideas That Change Lives fund that we work on is interested in investing in timebanking – and we’re planning another get-together later in the month. We’re particularly interested in chatting with individuals (not just people working in organisations) who want to see something happen in their community.

I went last night to the launch of an opportunity to invest in a pioneering strawbale co-housing community in Leeds.

I’ll let LILAC tell you more themselves.  You can also find out more on their website and on this blogpost from someone else who was there last night.

LILAC Cohousing Documentary from LILAC on Vimeo.

What impressed me last night was how the people involved responded to some fairly detailed questioning.  I talk a lot in my work about the need for activists and entrepreneurs – we need to be both if we are going to tackle some of the big social problems we face.  There’s a real passion amongst LILAC members to build something pioneering – but they’re not wishy-washy about it. This is a well-planned, well-executed development.  And, crucially, a development which seems to be meeting unmet demand – as all but 5 of the houses and flats are already allocated.  (You can contact them here if you’re interested in living at LILAC – they’re particularly keen to attract more families with school-age children.)

They asked me to say a few words last night in support of what they’re doing.  I’ve followed them pretty closely since they started looking at this idea – and a few people we know will be moving to LILAC.  I encouraged people to loan money to LILAC – and to do that, if they want to, without taking interest.  But I also encouraged people not to feel bad about expecting a financial return (LILAC are offering up to 3%).  I firmly believe that if we’re going to see more developments like LILAC, we need to encourage people to see them as viable investments – and expecting a 3% return is hardly over the top.  But clearly the people they’re last night with their cheque books were primarily investing because LILAC represents something that they believe in.

But my challenge to the people gathered last night was for us to see LILAC as a catalyst for other good things to happen. It’d be too easy to just point to them and bask in their solar thermal glow, whilst leaving our own lives untouched.  What would be more interesting would be to work with them and to learn from them about ways we too can change how we live.   Ways we can be more green and build communities where we feel supported and feel able to support others.

So, for example, we’re keen to explore whether we can collaborate with LILAC to form buying groups for solar panels – similar to the One Block Off The Grid model in the US.  And Collaborative Consumption – which will work brilliantly in a community such as LILAC – could work just as well in our street or yours – if we make the effort.  And maybe I need to take a bit more of a risk and talk to my neighbours more, invite them round for tea, and go beyond polite hello’s as we pass in the street.

We’re working on these issues a bit at the moment – for example we’re helping to run a Timebanking workshop in early July – which you can sign up for here. We’re also planning a Collaborative Consumption get-together for later in the year. If you’d like to work with us on any of this, please get in touch.

Before all of that, I’ll be investing in LILAC.  It would be great if you could too.

I wrote last week about our experience of Personalisation.  I talked you through the early stages of the self-directed support process, highlighting some issues that we’d come up against at each stage.  I’ll continue now with the next stages of the process, before considering what to do to change things for the better.  Again, your thoughts and experiences – in particular any examples of where things are working well  - would be much appreciated.

• Let’s look first of all at the support planning and brokerage stages.  We’ve witnessed a lack of creative thinking here.  There’s lots of terminology here – and how this is done differs in each local authority area.  But the basic idea is that a person is supported to work out how best to meet their desired outcomes (support planning).  They can then be supported to find creative, person-centred ways to meet those outcomes, by identifying appropriate services to buy (brokerage).

  We are finding that, even though support planning and brokerage can, in theory, be done by organisations outside of the social care system (eg an older people’s support network could do it for one of their members) the majority of this work is done by social workers.  Social workers who are under immense pressure, and have very little time.  Social workers who are accustomed, however person-centred they may be in their philosophy, to offering people what the system can offer.  It’s hardly surprising that (according to anecdotal evidence) the majority of people going through this process are ending up with pretty much what they had before.  In other words, services which the system can deliver.

  Let’s just pause and think about that for a while.  So a load of money, time and effort is being put into this, and it seems that a majority of people are coming out with what they always had.  Isn’t that a bit ridiculous, even if we accept that some people may actually be quite happy with what they had?  Well, what might seem more ridiculous is that, statistically at least, this person counts as someone who has accessed a Personal Budget (and until April 2011, councils received a financial incentive for getting people onto a Personal Budget in this way).  Even though nothing has changed for them, and the council still manages their money (sometimes spending it only on services provided by organisations with whom the council has framework agreements (contracts).  This is what is often referred to as a Virtual Budget. This statistical massage is why Ministers can confidently proclaim that all is well with Personalisation.

• One of the things councils have been charged with is stimulating  a market in social care.  They are required to produce what are called Market Position Statements – in order to communicate with other providers (third sector, private sector) how they would like to see the market develop.  In one area where we’ve done some work in the past, the consultation event on the Market Position Statement has been postponed twice, and we’re still waiting for a new date.  That’s not a great way to stimulate a market.

  But how do you stimulate a market?  I think it’s a really hard thing to do.  And to be fair to the councils where we’ve worked, they’ve each put money into encouraging third sector organisations to set up services.  But at the same time, they’ve been less than forthcoming with the kind of information which would give organisations confidence to take the risk in setting up services.  Simple information, like how many people in the city have got a Personal Budget, and how many of them ended up with services which were materially different to what they had before.

  So you can understand why, when they don’t get answers to these questions, organisations may assume that few people are being enabled to access new services.  If this is your perception, you’re hardly likely to set up a service are you?  Which, of course, means that there are fewer services to choose from – which makes it more likely that people will go for what they’ve always had.  And so we go on.

We do what we do because we want to make a difference.  I write stuff like this not to point the finger, but to acknowledge that things aren’t working as they could do.  I think, with a policy as radical as Personalisation, it’s natural that things will take a while to work out.  But you need to feel that things are at least moving in the right direction – and that issues are acknowledged.

I think that recently people are starting to publicly acknowledge that we are struggling to make Personalisation work.  I really think we need more openness about this.  But it doesn’t come naturally to local authorities to admit that they don’t have the answers.

What are we doing about this?  We’re continuing to work on Personalisation (some paid work, some speculative work) – and in particular we’re focusing on what we’ve called Personalisation – Made in…. We ran a Personalisation – Made in Bradford open space event earlier this month – and we’ve set up a network in Leeds too.  The idea is to bring different people together – who all have a stake in making this work.  Service providers, people who receive social care support, investors, service designers, social workers.  We believe that we’ll find ways to make Personalisation work by bringing people together to discuss issues openly, and then collaborating to make the system work for people.

The Government recently announced who will be the Prime Providers delivering Work Programme contracts across the country.

The Work Programme is basically about supporting people to get them back into paid employment.  I don’t doubt for a minute that we need some fresh thinking here, and I’m not opposed to private sector involvement.  But there are various issues which are causing me some concern in the way that things are happening.

Social Enterprise Magazine has done some good work looking into this in more detail.  The Department for Work of Pensions and the Minister for Civil Society have been keen to assert that 40% of the work will be carried out by voluntary sector providers  – as sub-contractors to the (mainly private sector) Prime Providers.  In other words, this is a massive boost for the Big Society.

But it’s not easy to work out exactly where that 40% figure has come from.  A quick look through the letter from Chris Grayling, (see pdf at bottom of article) outlining which sectors the subcontractors on each Prime Provider contract come from, invites you to challenge whether 40% of the fees will find their way to third sector providers.

Take, for example, my patch, West Yorkshire.  The two Prime Providers for our area are BEST and a collaboration between Ingeus and Deloitte.

The letter from Employment Minister Chris Grayling seems to suggest that none of BEST’s subcontractors will come from the third sector, whilst 8.2% of the work on the Ingeus/Deloitte contract will be delivered by the third sector.

That doesn’t feel like a victory for the West Yorkshire branch of the Big Society.

What bothers me here is that it feels like another example of dogmatic belief getting in the way of hard analysis of facts, and experience of how such contracting arrangements may not always work in the best interests of smaller providers.

I’ve written before about how I see parallels between the category management approach often adopted by supermarkets, and the Prime Provider system which the DWP is using.  Whilst, of course, there’s a world of difference between purchasing tinned fruit and procuring job-readiness training, I think it’s worth acknowledging that there is potential for difficulty when a big company (the Prime Provider) is tasked with collaborating with lots of smaller providers.  Government would have us believe that they’ll all play happy families, nurturing the young’uns and small’uns so that together they can share the proceeds and make the contract a success.  I’m afraid I just don’t believe that it will turn out like that in a lot of cases.

Others have written about their concerns about how the Work Programme will pan out.  There certainly seem to have been issues with regards to an over-emphasis on low prices, in place of quality.  That doesn’t bode well – and certainly doesn’t feel like the kind of environment where the smaller, perhaps more innovative, approaches will thrive.

I’m not a great fan of fanfare.  Initiatives which get enthusiastic backing from people who tell me that they have the solution to this or that big issue tend to leave me feeling a bit uneasy.

So I watched with interest, and a fair dollop of scepticism,  the emergence of Start Up Britain, the entrepreneurship initiative which was launched today by a host of celebrity entrepreneurs.

That’s not to say that it won’t do some good stuff.  Just as I think that plenty of good will eventually come from all the debate around Big Society.  But I find myself feeling  sceptical about what I heard about today.

It doesn’t help that if you air that scepticism, as I did a bit, and my good friend Mike Chitty did a good bit more today on Twitter, you are immediately accused of having that terrible British disease, cynicism.  Such reactions are even stronger than normal when it comes to entrepreneurship.  We’re so terribly aware that we aren’t Americans – (after all Start Up Britain is modelled on a similar US scheme) – that we jump on anyone who isn’t whooping and doing enthusiastic high-fives when confronted by a bit of US style razzmatazz.  It’s easier to dismiss your critics than accept that they may just have a point.

I’m not a cynic, but I’m a sceptic, and I think that can be quite a healthy position, particularly if it’s informed by experience.  I’m sceptical about a lot of activity that takes place encouraging entrepreneurship.  That comes from first-hand experience of running businesses, succeeding and failing in business and supporting businesses – particularly start-up social enterprises.

We rely a lot on immensely successful, big scale, charismatic entrepreneurs to inspire the mass of people who are tentatively considering setting up their first business.  I can’t help but feel that there’s a mismatch there, and beyond the transient fuzzy feeling that you might get from hearing a good story, I’m not wholly convinced that such activities are all that useful for many people who are just starting out.

But this kind of thing clearly does work for some people.  Yet I think we forget that most businesses won’t be high growth, and they won’t be leaders in their market.  Of those that succeed, (a majority will probably fail – although I’m not sure that story was told today) many will be good businesses, keeping people in employment, serving customers well, but not setting the world on fire.  That, as far as I’m concerned, is fine – it’s the kind of steady, long-term business activity that we probably need more of.  Not everyone will be pitching to venture capitalists for £10 million to develop a world-beating brand.

So my point is that there are whole worlds of entrepreneurship which are a million miles away from the high-octane, celebrity-filled, soundbite friendly world of Start Up Britain.  And just as there’ll be lots of people who don’t respond to the kind of work that I do – the DIY Business Planning, the Ideas Circles and the like, I believe there are loads of people who, when offered a vision of entrepreneurship that appears to be about high-growth, big egos and fast cash, will end up feeling that setting up in business isn’t for them after all.

So we need different approaches, of course we do.  Let’s hope Start Up Britain (and yes, I accept it’s a startup itself, so it’s early days) encourages different approaches and values the small scale, occasionally mundane entrepreneurial activity alongside the high-octane stuff.

Let Start Up Britain also be a challenge for  those of us who perhaps have a slightly different vision of entrepreneurship, and who consider that there may be other ways to encourage more people to set up in business.  What does my city need?  A home-grown Peter Jones?  Or hundreds of people setting up good businesses, of different shapes and sizes, that fulfill them, serve their customers well and set down local roots?  I guess the answer is that it’d be handy to have both – but to have that I think we need to think more broadly about the messages we give out about entrepreneurship.

We ran our first Ideas Circle last night, for the Ideas That Change Lives investment fund.

The aim was to give a group of social entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch their idea to a group of people to get useful feedback, ideas and contacts.

A few years ago, we would have made a play of how it was a bit like Dragon’s Den (like we did when we ran something similar as part of our Starter for Ten course in 2006) – but it’s fair to say that other than the pitch, it’s got very little in common with that format, which to be frank I can’t stand.

We invited people we know – a PR man, a lawyer, an accountant and a Charity chief exec and a couple of social care professionals – to listen to the pitches.  They all gave up their evening free of charge.  We also asked the entrepreneurs to be part of the circle for the other people pitching – to encourage a bit of collaboration and to get past the idea that we’re all competing against eachother.  In the majority of cases, most of us, as small start-up businesses, will have far more to gain from collaborating than we stand to lose by competing.

We were really pleased with it.  The focus was on giving people constructive feedback – so that (with our support) they can revise their business plan before it goes to the Investment Panel next month.

Needless to say, a few relationships were made and no doubt a few deals will be done too, so that’s all good.

We’re keen to do it again – taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people are keen to help other entrepreneurs, if the opportunity is a good one.  I also think it’ll be increasingly important as other sources of support (such as Business Link) disappear.  We need to find ways to effectively support and nurture eachother – particularly start-up entrepreneurs.

If you’re interested in us running an Ideas Circle for your investment fund or grants programme, please get in touch.

I fell off my bike yesterday – a victim of icy roads.  Nothing broken, but I can hardly move, so have spent most of the day sat on the sofa.  It’s a bit of a pain, as I’ve got loads to do, but as always it’s handy to stop, think and read every now and then, even if the thinking is through the fug of painkillers and anti-inflammatories.

One of things I did was watch a TED video about collaborative consumption:

The talk is by Rachel Botsman, co-author of What’s Mine is Yours – The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, which is released in the UK next month.

I’m a sucker for neat concepts and smart phrases such as Collaborative Consumption, but Rachel thinks this is an idea which has staying power.  She reckons we’re hard-wired to share, and it’s only recently, in the age of hyper-consumption, that we’ve begun to crave ownership of more goods, rather than focusing on just securing access to goods or services.

In a world with finite resources, there are clear, negative environmental implications of us all racing to own and consume.  And there’s a decent argument for saying that our desire for private, exclusive ownership doesn’t do our communities much good either.  If we don’t need anything from anyone else, we’re less likely to engage with anyone else.

But the reverse is true also.  If we acknowledge our interdependence, and also recognise that sharing things can save money, be more green and perhaps build a bit of community then we may well find that our neighbourhoods feel a bit more like the kind of neighbourhoods that most of us aspire to live in.

As I dipped in and out of Twitter today there was plenty of talk of library closures in the UK.  It’s anticipated that lots will close as local councils struggle desperately to make ends meet.

I don’t want to discuss the politics of that just now, but I do want to reflect on the rise of collaborative consumption and the apparent fall of the public library.  If some are saved and run by volunteers, will they continue to deliver the same service ?  Or might they re-imagine their service as a local hub for collaborative consumption?  Maybe I could borrow a guide book to Paris, alongside a power drill?  A power drill that someone else in my community has offered up for sharing – at a fee – shared between them and the library? It might be mission drift, or it might just make libraries relevant to more people.