Advisory services

I am doing various bits of values-based consulting. My specialisms are economics (especially innovation, development, public finance, health and climate change) and using evidence to inform choice. I’m also excellent and translating technical ideas into comprehensible, accurate language.

A book: Moonshot

After three decades of working on innovation, technology and public policy, from various perspectives, I am writing a book setting out a policymakers’ guide to innovation: why does it matter, which innovations are priorities, and how should the government go about supporting them? The book both summarises what we have learned, but also makes some disruptive suggestions. These include an update to benefit cost ratio calculations, changes to the Haldane Principle, and the proper role of new pull instruments such as Advance Market Commitments. As the leader of the team that introduced the world’s first AMC, I am well placed to guide readers through the complexities of this essential but under-researched, and often inaccessible, reasearch are.

An app: customer choice

Consumers repeatedly demonstrate that many of them want to direct their purchases to products and services whose values they share. But the time and difficulty of finding out who is behind what we buy is makes that impractical. We need an app – on our phones, and as a browser plugin – that tells us quickly which product most aligns with our concerns. I’m developing an app that will link every barcode to a product and a company, each of which will be ranked in multiple dimensions by a community of volunteers (think of Wikipedia).

The aim is to build a trusted, non-commercial platform that protects your data, which integrates easily into your shopping.