sutton038

An hour or so out of London, in the commuter belt, is a place called Cheshunt. It is home to the world’s crappest corporate headquarters. They belong to Tesco and they're situated in a light industrial zone, next door to Monster Gym, the first American style warehouse gym in the UK ( satellite image here and google street view here ) TESCO: A RIGHT SHITHOLE This photo was taken in 2009, and at the time I was trying to sell Tesco esoteric financial derivatives. I sat in a room with someone from the treasury and suggested she should consider entering into a large transaction which, at the time, I thought to be in both our interests. She didn’t dig the idea, but appreciated the attempt. Innovation, she said, was what Tesco was all about. Looking back, I feel privileged to have walked the crap linoleum floor of the world’s crappest corporate headquarters, to have seen the crap canteen plonked in the entrance lobby, and the crap cramped desks of the employees that run one of the world’...

Trading floors and paneled offices in Canary Wharf look profoundly hi-tech, and yet they are built on blueprints inherited from the past, in some cases the very distant past. Modern financial institutions like to use the language of innovation, and yet they endorse only a narrow conception of innovation, focused on product innovation. There’s very little tinkering with the base level assumptions from which they are created. To challenge the deep-level normative status quo requires one to move out of the mainstream salons, and into the fringe coffee shops and covert speakeasies. Close to Moorgate station is one such safehouse, down a small alley, behind an austere wooden door. Enter the Finance Innovation Lab . The Finance Lab initially started as a joint project by the WWF and ICAEW , asking the question “What does a financial system that serves people and planet look like?” It’s now a forum for an assortment of financial heretics, some outrightly so, others more subtly so. The commu...

London is the home to a small but growing ‘social finance’ community. It’s an imprecise term, but in general social finance is seen to encompass finance for social causes, finance for public services, finance for social enterprises, and finance for vulnerable communities. That covers a pretty wide scope, ranging from crackpot schemes to move back to a barter economy, all the way to mainstream debates about alternative finance sources for public services. On Wednesday I attended PopSe! , a ‘popup think-tank’ on social enterprise. The theme of the day was social finance, and in particular, the issues around the UK government’s plans to set up the ‘ Big Society Bank ’. That’s a pretty politicised name for a bank, and gives rise to interpretations of it being the thin edge of a wedge the government is promoting to take the slack from its public service pull-back. To be accurate though, the Big Society Bank is not really a bank. It’s more like an investment fund, and it will start with £100...

Last week Boris Johnson announced the Living Wage to be £8.30 for London . The Living Wage campaign, started by Citizens UK , recently celebrated its tenth year of trying to boost the incomes of those on the lowest rungs of enterprise. One way to speed up the campaign is through shareholder activism, buying a share and attending the annual general meeting of a company to raise the issue. On Monday, I attended the Centrica AGM on behalf of advocacy group FairPensions , to see if the board would be willing to commit to the Living Wage. Centrica are the guys that run British Gas, and they have a large number of employees in lower salary brackets, for example, all the call-centre staff. You’re playing to a tough crowd when you do shareholder activism. Think about who actually attends a three hour meeting starting at mid-day: Most are loyal supporters of the company and many are former employees, now retired. They have a slightly sycophantic edge, especially considering part of their self-...

Last week the World Resources Institute (WRI) posted a challenge on Innocentive , the online innovation reward website, offering cash prizes to individuals for solutions to climate change adaption issues. There is a total of $10 000 up for grabs if you can articulate a clear and actionable vision for climate change communication strategies in vulnerable communities. WRI’s approach adds to the broader debate on how you finance climate innovation . There’s much discussion concerning how to deploy money into existing technologies and ideas, but how do you best put money into creating new technologies and ideas? In issues of strategic concern, governments have frequently used grants , for example, to support universities and research institutes to develop new ideas and technologies. That has the advantage of giving innovators space to develop ideas without an immediate need for commercialisation. On the other hand, government grants risk being too prescriptive: What if the government choos...