Blog posts March 2012
Lego, scuffed trainers, 10,000 hours, and project-based learning
In 2005, Lego was haemorrhaging $1 million per day, and they brought in a new Chief Executive Officer, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, to save it. The story of what he did is told very well by Brad Wieners in Bloomberg Businessweek.
One of Knudstorp's first actions was to commission two years of extended research into how children around the world like to spend their time.
According to Wieners, the researchers 'Eureka Moment' arrived when an eleven-year-old in Germany showed them...
Guest-post from Enabling Enterprise: 'Why Learn?'
Here at the Innovation Unit, we're big fans of Enabling Enterprise, who help teachers by integrating skills development into different areas of the curriculum using enterprise programmes. We met them because we are both Whole Education partners. The following post, written by Anna Chojnicka and Tom Ravenscroft, explains what Enabling Enterprise is all about
The tricky question of making the "best use" of informal networks
For the last few months, we have been working on an exciting project with Buckingamshire County Council. We have squeezed a lot of our brain muscles into the development of a county-wide community-based preventative model for adult social care. In fact, it seems that we have squeezed our brain muscles so hard that we haven't taken the time to pin down some of our key learnings.
One of them, though, is starting to emerge as a common thread across different projects.
It is the idea that informal and semi-formal social networks, such as family...
