Geoff Mulgan
Geoff Mulgan is director of the Young Foundation based in London and Visiting Professor at University College, London, the London School of Economics and University of Melbourne as well as being the chair of Involve. Previously he was:
- Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street under British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
- Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (formerly known as the Performance and Innovation Unit),
- Co-founder and Director of the London based think tank Demos (from 1993-98),
- Chief adviser to Gordon Brown MP in the early 1990s [1]
He obtained his Ph.D. in telecommunications from the University of Westminster. He was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and obtained a First Class degree from Balliol College, Oxford. Mulgan was also trained as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka [2], but instead worked in local government and academia in the UK, and became an influential writer on social and political issues in various newspapers and magazines in the 1990s. [3] He was made a CBE in 2005.
He has written a number of books including: Communication and Control:networks and the new economies of communication (1991), Politics in an Anti-Political Age (1994), Connexity (1997) and Good and Bad Power: the Ideals and Betrayals of Government (Penguin 2006). He has written numerous Demos reports and pamphlets. His current base, the Young Foundation, mainly works on social innovation - design and launch of new social organisations, but also produces some publications, including recent ones on social innovation and the state of British society [4] He has lectured and advised governments around the world on policy and strategy - including China, Australia, the United States, Japan and Russia. He is profiled in two books - The New Alchemists (1999 by Charles Handy) and Visionaries (2001 by Jay Walljasper). He is a trustee of the Design Council and the Work Foundation.