Fixing the Future
In February the Young Foundation published Fixing the Future: Innovating more effective responses to recession a paper focused on how to mitigate the recession and where possible turn crisis into opportunity. Following on from this a new manifesto and website called ‘fixing the future’ has been launched which calls for Europe to shift gear in its responses to recession.
Partners the Young Foundation and Europe Unlimited believe that the focus of current actions is to put right past mistakes instead of investing in future success. And that too little is being done to promote entrepreneurship, innovation and infrastructures that will be essential to Europe’s future growth.
Calls for Europe’s governments, businesses and non-governmental organisations now need to commit to a set of principles to guide recovery plans and policies and clearly commit to investment in the future.
Fixing the Future specifically argues that Europe should:
1. Reshape recovery plans to address the long-term challenges that
Europe faces, in particular adaptation to climate change, ageing and
chronic disease
2. Prioritise the sectors with the greatest prospects of future jobs
growth, including health and care, education, environmental services,
tourism and the creative industries.
3. Promote pluralism and local creativity, shifting investment to many
small scale local and regional initiatives rather than putting all
resources into grand but risky national projects.
4. Invest in innovation with a significant share of investment directed
to creating new products and services, including innovation in the
public, social, educational, creative and tourism sectors.
5. Back entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, whether through tax
incentives and guarantees, or provision of space for microenterprises.
6. Support new infrastructures, accelerating investment in the decisive
new infrastructures for the future, like universal high speed broadband
and low carbon energy grids.
7. Guarantee security by protecting social spending and supporting
temporary job creation as the precondition for healthy risk-taking.
8. Reward investor responsibility by reshaping policies to support those
institutional and private investors who have invested long term in
sound enterprises with high standards of governance and risk management.
9. Mobilise public creativity by using the radical potential of web 2.0
and social networks to develop public ideas for mitigating the impact of
the recession.
10. Learn fast with more systematic ways of evaluating and learning from Europe and the world about what works.
For further information, to pledge your support or to engage in Fixing the Future visit www.fixingthefuture.eu
To download the Young Foundation Fixing the Future: Innovating more effective responses to recession paper visit http://www.youngfoundation.org/social-innovation/news/fixing-future