Charles Leadbeater

Charlie Leadbeater is an strategic adviser and long time collaborator with the British Innovation Unit, focusing on innovation in approaches to learning.

He helped start the UK debate about personalised learning with his Demos pamphlet Personalisation through Participation and followed that up with The Shape of Things to Come, which looks at the role of collaboration and networks in school improvement. In What’s Next: 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning he looked at the way schools were personalizing learning but also extending their reach into families and communities.

His current work, sponsored by Cisco – Learning from the Extremes – explores the role of social entrepreneurs promoting new approaches to learning in slums and informal settlements in developing world cities, particularly in India, Brazil and Kenya. Learning from the Extremes based on more than 100 case studies of socially entrepreneurship in education in ‘extreme’ environments will be published later this year.
 
The New York Times anointed Charlie’s idea, The Pro-Am Revolution, as one of the biggest global ideas of 2004.

In 2008, Spectator Magazine described him as "the wizard of the web". He most recent book “ We Think; mass innovation not mass production” has been an Amazon bestseller and is about to be published in China, India, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere in Europe.

In 2003 Accenture, the global management consultancy, ranked him one of the top management thinkers in the world, and in 2007 the Financial Times ranked him the outstanding innovation expert in the UK.

He spent ten years working for the Financial Times between 1985 and 1995. In 1998 we won the prestigious David Watt Prize for journalism.

After the Financial Times he moved to the Independent where he became Assistant Editor in charge of where, together with Helen Fielding, he devised Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Since 1997 Charlie has been an adviser to the Downing Street Policy Unit and the Department of Trade and Industry on the Internet and the knowledge driven economy, helping to shape government policy across a number of fronts.

The vision statement he drafted for the Culture Online programme in 2001 predicted the web would become increasingly participative and collaborative.

He drafted the UK Government’s White Paper – Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy published in 1998, one of the first policy papers in the world to argue that advanced economies would become increasingly dependent upon innovation for growth.

The UK Government has also turned to him for advice on policy issues ranging from health and education to climate change and culture.
 
He is a senior research associate with Demos, the leading London think tank, a visiting Fellow at Oxford’s University Business School and a founder of Participle, the public services innovation agency, which is working with public sector agencies to create next generation public services.

Charlie is also a visiting fellow at the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, where he has championed ideas of open and user driven innovation.

Before publishing We Think he had written several acclaimed books and reports, including:

•    The bestseller Living on Thin Air, published in 1998, which predicted the rise of the internet driven, knowledge economy.

•    The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur, published in 1997, which was one of the first books to predict social entrepreneurs and social enterprise solutions to public problems would become more compelling. Social entrepreneurship has since become a global movement.

He was educated at a state comprehensive school in Basingstoke in Hampshire before winning a scholarship to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford.

There he gained a Distinction in his first public examinations and left with a 1st Class Honours degree.

Charlie lives in North London with his wife and children.