International Conference UAW – Lisbon
23 April 2014
KEY NOTE SPEECH
“Social Innovation: Motor for social and economic development”
Mr. Simon Willis
CEO – Young Foundation
Good evening. Unfortunately we have run out of time, so any questions? (laughter)
I was… I was very touched this morning session listening to Domingos, and Jaime, and
Filipa paying tribute to my dear friend and former colleague Diogo Vasconcelos, and it
reminded me of a time quite a few years ago when I was in Lisbon. And coming to Lisbon
is a very bittersweet feeling because I always associated it with being here with Diogo,
who is no longer with us, and I was speaking at a conference which Diogo had arranged
and we were running a little bit behind schedule, it was the end of the morning session,
and I thought I could catch us up to the right time, so I spoke very quickly and I spoke for
12 minutes and sat down again and we were back on time. And Diogo rushed up to me
in the coffee break and said: “What the hell was that?” and I said: “well, I was getting us
back on track and also showing respect to the audience by being brief, as we do in
England”, and he said: “Okay look, listen to me, in Portugal the way you show respect to
the audience is to speak for as long as possible” (laughter). So I’m just going to talk for
two or three hours now, sorry about that, you might want to text your families that you
are going to be late for dinner.
So, this is my plan, I’m going to talk about four things: the problem we face together,
some of the traditional answers that have been provided to this problem, what role social
innovation might play, particularly disrupted social innovation, and how to get started on
this project.
So here’s the problem and I’m no expert on the situation… this is a very small shelf…
and I am no expert on the situation in Portugal so I’m going to speak from the point of
view of the UK. And some of these problems may be familiar to you, some might be
different. But we’ve been through a period of increasing crisis and catastrophe, where
effectively not only have the governments, that we looked to, to control the worst
excesses of the markets, effectively become collaborators with those markets and in
particular with the financial markets and participated in increasing financialization of our
economy so that a larger and larger proportion of GDP growth in the last two decades
has been captured by the financial sector, hand-in-hand with the process which of course
came to ahead of a few years ago, whereby we can see that we and our governments
have had to take on the funding of all the risks, not only of the primary and fundamental
research that underpins the innovation in the private sector but also taking on board the
losses that they’ve made as a result of taking too many risks, while allowing the rewards
to be not only privatized but captured by an ever smaller elite of the top of our companies
or organizations and our banks.
This has been underpinned by what I’ve called here the de-legitimization of some
collectives. What I mean by this is that the discourse has been about the importance of
the individual, the freedom of the individual and the breaking down of our ability to
organize ourselves socially, to organize labour, to organize collectives to counteract
some of the powers which are damaging us. I say some collectives because while the
discourse has been very much about the illegitimacy of organized labour and other
collectives that are regarded as being old-fashioned and part of the past, the collective
organization of capital and of financial services and the capture of many government
decisions by organized capital has remained and indeed increased in strength. We’ve
seen at the same time a strong set of arguments for privatization which have effectively
allowed the penetration of many of the social and state services that we’ve built up in the
post-war period to effectively also be captured by financial elites so that profit can be
extracted at the expense of providing healthcare, education, social welfare and so on.
This has been allied in recent times with the particularly unpleasant narrative of blaming
the victim or sometimes blaming the outsider. What I mean by this is, when we drive
people into debt and into unemployment and into poverty and into obesity and into unwellness by the unbalanced nature of our economies to then turn around and blame
those individuals for being undertrained, lazy, greedy, too much reliant on hand-outs and
so on and so forth is a particularly violent way of justifying what has been a regrettable
set of actions by our elites. It’s the common redoubt of the bully, starting in the playground
and going up to the level of the nation and then even the region to blame the victims for
the punishment that you made out to them. It has always been the way of the violent and
abusive to do this and I think particularly in the context of Europe, when I look at the
discourse in recent years around the southern European countries - the idea that
Portugal and Greece and Spain and others should be blamed for having participated in
a system which enriched the banks and countries that now blame them for the situation
they’re in - as extraordinary and should be rejected.
What I’m trying to draw here is a parallel between the way we talk about those people at
the bottom of society and those who’ve been left behind, about the growing extraordinary
damaging phenomenon of youth unemployment and the way which we talk about various
countries, I think there are some interesting analogies between the two. And they are
part of the same system. And underpinning much of it has been debt.
The problem we’ve had is that economic growth for the last two or three decades has
created surpluses which have to a very large extend been captured by the top five or ten
percent of society. Now this is an unsustainable way to run a national, regional or
international economy because it suppresses economic demand which drives the motor,
which is generating the wealth. And the only way out of it has been to lend more and
more money to those people who have not benefited from economic growth so that they
can continue to be economic participants and to drive for that growth. This is obviously
a completely unsustainable system and led to a first taste of the catastrophe that
ultimately must come from it in 2008. And the following extraordinary set of
circumstances by which we all paid to bail out the financial institutions, that had created
the unsustainable debt structures and now had to pay through austerity by cutting
benefits to the poorest and the weakest to make back and reduce some of the debt that
in many cases was largely created by bailing out the very financial institutions and banks
that had created the problem in the first place.
This is an Alice in Wonderland situation. What underpins this economic phenomena, set
of phenomena, has been as you all know rising inequality. And Portugal, as we can see
here has chosen to be in the very elite company of the United Kingdom and United States
- and congratulations on that - has been one of the most unequal societies in the
developed world.
This is another illustration of the same problem, here in the US, which is of course
running just a little bit ahead of Portugal and the United Kingdom, but it gives an
absolutely striking illustration of what has been happening over the last 30 years,
following a very slight decline in inequality following the second world war, we’ve seen
effectively return to a situation which we last saw at the very beginning of the 20th century
with the top 1% capturing here half of all capital gains in the US and the top 100 to 1%
capturing around half of that. I put this picture up because I really like the expression on
this woman’s face. I have absolutely no idea what her sign says and perhaps somebody
could tell me afterwards because for the look of serenity and truth on her face I imagine
that what it says on the sign is something true. What is the effect of this inequality? It’s
corrosive at every level of society; I think we have to stop talking about the effect on the
poor and alone and on the socially excluded or even using terms like “social exclusion”
because this is a distortion of our economy which is corrosive in every way. It’s corrosive
and damaging in terms of mental health, in terms of chronic illness, but most profoundly
and particularly when we have high level of long and sustained youth unemployment, it
creates a breakdown in social cohesion, a breaking apart of the trust that we have in
each other and the profound undermining of the trust that we have in our companies, in
our institutions, in the parliaments, in police forces, in our newspapers and TV stations.
Trust levels certainly in the UK have never been so low as they are now. If you ask
people about each of those sectors and each of the organizations which present them
“Do you trust that these people are there to serve your interests” and in the United
Kingdom at least it’s now down at around 30% of people who answer “yes” to the
question that they trust these institutions. And that is an extremely dangerous situation
for us all to be in. Because it opens people to the attractions of easy answers and in
particularly populism and what we are starting to see at least in the United Kingdom is
increasing attraction to the idea of blaming firstly Europe, secondly foreigners,
particularly immigrants, and finally the poor. Now, a situation where you start to blame
immigrants and the poor for a situation that was created by anybody other than those
people is a very dangerous social situation to be in and we’ve seen that story before.
So what are the traditional answers? Well, we have a group of people.. I’m going to do
this really crudely in terms of the right - politically, the left and the kind of middle way,
certainly in our country and the US called the third way for a while, and what they offer
us. Well, very simplistically on the far right what they tell is that we need more market
forces, we need more competition, with need more entrepreneurialism, if we can just get
the state to reduce in size and get off the back of the natural entrepreneurial energy of
the market then the problems would all be solved. That is getting to be a very hard story
to maintain given the facts of the last 30 years but it’s still maintained. On the left and
again I’m being incredibly simplistic we traditionally had an answer that what we need is
more state, that we need a government that would provide for people and that we could
solve everybody’s problems.
The third way approach, the kind of middling approach that was developed by Tony Blair
and Bill Clinton amongst others, in a sense to my mind took the worse of both sides. It
said, let’s have the market being relatively unbridled and let’s privatize as much as we
possibly can and give particularly financial services as much freedom as possible to do
more or less whatever they like and part their profits in the offshore sector. And at the
same time let’s proceed to try and mop up the damage afterwards by having a social
program that deals with the after effects of the aforementioned by providing a welfare
system which encourages dependency amongst those that have been left behind effectively capturing the worst elements of both sides of the previous political
alternatives. Characteristic behind all traditional arguments which seek to end argument,
to end political argument, is to claim that there is no alternative, that it is scientifically,
ineluctably, inevitably proven that certain things must be the way they are.
You know, when I was young there were still Marxists around who believed that it was
scientifically inevitable that capitalism would destroy itself and this was certainly a big
relief to young socially concerned people like me because all you really had to do apart
from going on the occasional demonstrations and read some extremely difficult to
understand French theory was just wait until capitalism destroyed itself. It was
scientifically proven, it was kind of determined. No less ridiculous, damaging and toxic is
the claim of the neoliberals that the market works the way it does because of some kind
of God given scientific inevitability and that all we have to do is get out of the way let it
do its magic. This tyranny of no alternatives, as the Brazilian philosopher Roberto
Mangabeira Unger has called it, is really the greatest enemy that we have in my view.
This idea that you have no alternative is the most profound, dangerous enemy that we
face. It has always been the case that we had a choice and we have exercised a choice
often through large-scale disruptive social innovation. We decided for example that we
didn’t want children to work in factories at the age of six or eight, or ten. The arguments
that were mounted against stopping children from working in factories at the time that
those laws were introduced and lobbied for politically were exactly the same arguments
that we will hear now when you hear people trying to argue for capping executive pay or
capping bonuses in banking or introducing some kind of respectful minimum wage for
workers. We decided we didn’t want slavery at a certain point and the same arguments
were heard again. If we together decide that we want a particular social outcome from
our markets, if we recall that they are our tool that they belong to us and they are ours in
the same sense that their government of ours, then we can choose together any outcome
that we collectively want. And the inequality and degradation and youth unemployment
that we have found ourselves with at this point in time is not of our choosing. It is not
what we collectively want. So we have to find strategies to together choose some
alternative routes.
And this is where unexpectedly I’m going to swerve into the subject of innovation. I put
a picture up here of a river delta because early cities and civilizations were all built around
river deltas for all sorts of interesting reasons and became the crucibles of innovation as
well as civilization, and I think part of the reason - there is some good agricultural and
geographical reasons why you might see the growth of civilizations around river deltas,
but it’s also because they were like an early Internet if you like. They were a form of
physical network that allowed for exchange between diverse groups and when you have
exchange of specialization and growing diversity, so innovation is based on networking
together people of very diverse outlooks and abilities in creating new ways of solving our
problems. One of the interesting side effects of growing inequality is almost certainly a
fall-off in innovation because inequality leads to a lack of diversity at each strata of
society, causes a kind of growing homogenization and also is driven by a very narrow
sense of human possibility and of what thriving looks like rather than a multiplicity of
interdependent flourishing which is what people naturally in communities would seek if
they were given to freedom to do so.
So I’m interested in innovation because I think one of the interesting things that socially
concerned people and amongst the people on the left did wrong was to turn their back
on innovation and entrepreneurialism because they associated those things with the
market and they assumed therefore there must be something wrong with them. And I
think that one of the interesting things about the social innovation movement at its most
radical is that it says “let us find a different third way, one that takes the tools of innovation
and entrepreneurialism, which are so powerful in terms of driving change and productivity
and the expansion of human possibility, let us take those tools and strategies from the
market and let us apply them to the social ends which we’ve been trying to achieve
largely through the state. So fundamentally this new third way says we will not solve our
social problems in the traditional way, we will not solve them using large top-down
hierarchical public-sector institutions that innovate at the pace of the snail - certainly the
Labour government in the UK tried the project of seeing whether we could sort out our
social problems by making everybody in the country into a civil servant - I think you tried
something similar here in Portugal and it doesn’t work, but nor does handing these
problems over to the market work. The market is profoundly ill-equipped to deal with the
complexity and subtlety of the social problems that we are wrestling with, and is not
motivated to do so, and is not constructed to do so.
So, this is what the innovation movement is about, it is about a new attempt to solve
some of these problems using what we see is the best of both sides and it doesn’t try to
replace market, which has a role, or the state which also has a role but rather take the
very best of those, route them in the third sector, in the social sector, the sector that’s
made up of misfits, cranks, troublemakers, thinkers, academics, churches, political
parties, community groups etc. etc. etc. you know, the big… the other sector, the sector
in between. Route it in that sector and taking the best strategies from the other two, says
maybe we can solve some of these social problems in a new way. So, I put up what is
regarded in the private sector as some of the traditional innovation strategy areas that
people look at - and there’s a huge literature on each of these and sometimes if you start
researching you’ll find that there are 10 or 12 or 15 or whatever, it doesn't particularly
matter - but the main point to make is that innovation is not just about product innovation.
And much of the thinking that we have in our heads about what innovation is about, part
of the reason we find it so hard to understand and think about what social innovation
might look like, if we took it to radical scale is because we are somewhat captured by
this idea of product innovation, things like, you know, the iPhone. But in fact, of course
in the private sector as in all sectors most innovations happen in other areas and I have
outlined some of them there. The other piece of pretty well thought through
categorization of innovation in the private sector is the difference between strategies
which are sustaining or disruptive. And there’s a lot of confusion about these terms.
Really all that it means is that the sustaining innovation is one that happens inside an
existing company or organization and it can be either incremental or it can be radical. So
a company can come up with a completely radical innovation or it can slowly improve
innovations it has made before, and that’s the difference between radical and
incremental. A disruptive innovation strategy is something completely different; it’s the
strategy by which a small start-up company destroys a large incumbent, and the private
sector, and the market, is driven forward by disruptive innovation, by what should better
be called credit destruction, whereby very, very small companies constantly displace
large companies under certain conditions. And we’ve got a problem at the moment in our
economy because one of the conditions that you need is that the large incumbents have
not captured the government and policymaking and regulation to the extent that they are
able to effectively defend themselves against disruptive entry into the market, which is
what all large incumbents attempt to do. The more you have a concentration of wealth in
very small elites as if seen in my country and in yours the more at danger we are that
that resource will be applied to corrupting government decision-making.
However, the reason I’m so interested in disruptive innovation strategies is not because
they are at-risk in the private sector but because I think they are increasingly what we
are going to need if we are going to find the full potential of social innovation. So, most
social innovation today has been in the first category. It’s been sustaining and small
incremental experiments inside existing organizations that slightly improve things and it’s
good and it’s well worth doing and apart from anything else it equips a larger and larger
group of people with the skills that they need in order to become disruptive innovators
and disruptive social entrepreneurs. So, I’m not saying anything against sustaining
incremental social innovation; what I’m saying is that if we’ve got a problem with
incumbents and incumbent elites then the strategy we are going to need is a disruptive
one, we’re going to need on occasions, to attack from outside and from below and what
that means is setting up new organizations, and they will be small, and the very best of
our social enterprises in the end should be able to solve our social problems more
effectively and create more demand for their approach than the large institutions which
they seek to replace.
This is a really optimistic strategy, I mean… I am despite all the really depressing,
negative things I’ve said so far in this talk fundamentally an optimist. But I think it’s going
to take a lot of hard work, a lot of courage to pursue some of these disruptive strategies.
Placing it in historical context, what I’ve put here is very roughly the kind of historical
development of innovation strategies in the private sector over the last 100 to 120 years
and I’m not going to dwell on these approaches at all. The point I really wanted to make
is that one of the other reasons we find it so hard to understand, and think about and talk
about social innovation, is because it’s actually different in nature from those who have
come before. It is based on and draws on a number of the previous approaches,
particularly open innovation and design-based innovation, but the reason it’s so different
is because not only does it have a particular outcome in mind - positive social impact
rather than profits to the innovator - but it’s also social in its methodology. It rejects the
idea that the way to solve our social problems is to get a couple of bright postgraduates
and put them into room in the capital city to think of another strategy for the government
to implement from the top down.
Social innovation, goes about its work in a completely different way by starting in
communities, by starting with people who understand and are concerned about the
problems they are trying to solve, whether they be in healthcare or education or childcare
or obesity or unemployment or training or whatever it is, where practitioners or sufferers
come together and start to design themselves new interventions and new solutions from
the bottom up. So, social innovation is social in its objectives as well as in its
methodologies. And typically at least the way that we’ve practiced it for over the last 60
years in the Young Foundation, it starts by using qualitative research and ethnography
rather than quantitative research. The world is awash with people measuring stuff, you
know we’ve got statisticians and macro economists and micro economists, and now
we’ve got big data coming along; but if you really want to understand the nature and
texture of the failure of a particular policy or service you have to sit down at length with
the people that you are attempting to help and understand how their lives and their
families actually work day-to-day, and no economist, no matter how micro, can tell you
the answer to that question. So you start in an embedded way in a community listening
deeply and understanding what people’s problems are before proceeding into a process
of iterative social collaborative co-design of new solutions. That’s the way that I believe
social innovation at its most disruptive can and should be practiced.
Maria do Carmo made a very good point earlier today that one of the strengths of social
innovation over the typical policy strategies that are used in the public sector is that it
can be experimental, that it need not waste very vast sums of money implementing very
vast projects, that, as the ambassador said, no longer answer the correct problem by the
time they finally come to fruition, but rather proceed by iterative steps and experiments
that mitigate to the greatest possible degree the risks of doing something new.
I’m not going to send you all to sleep by talking at length about this slide but I’m very
happy to share it with anybody who wants it later, it’s kind of a very high level map of
some of the many specific sets of tools that we and the people that we work with have
developed to actually drive forward social innovation processes. And it goes through a
process of evaluation and testing and iteration, so in effect this is a more elaborated
version of the previous slide that gives you some sense of some of the rich texture of the
actual practitioners working in the field of social innovation.
So, I’m going to finish by giving some practical examples. As I said, we’ve been working
for 60 years in this field now and it’s interesting just to tell you how we started actually.
Michael Young worked in a think tank called Political and Economic Planning, classic
think tank in the middle of Whitehall, as a very, very clever young man and in 1945 he
wrote, - he was one of the lead authors of the Labour Manifesto which designed the
architecture of the welfare state in the UK, or a lot of it. Several years after that election
he started to get this uneasy feeling that the policies which Labour was implementing
were not having exactly the effects on those very people that they were trying to help,
that they thought that they were having. And so he moved out to the East End of London,
where we still are in Bethnal Green, to a very poor community, and he started doing
ethnography. He was trained as an ethnographer and sociologist and he started doing
this sitting around, listening to people and he discovered some really interesting things.
He discovered that these policies, enlightened policies of development, of
predevelopment, of new towns, of tower blocks and so on and so forth had failed to spot
one of the most fundamental ways in which people derive their ability to be resilient and
to flourish even in the most difficult of circumstances and that is through their extended
family and community networks, that were stopped to introduce policies, that tear apart
families and communities; you do far more deep damage than you realize that you’re
doing whatever the benefits of your policies may be, and this led to many changes in
social policy in the UK, but not enough. And it was through that set of insights and that
initial experiment that The Young Foundation began experimenting with this area of
social innovation, disruptive social innovation ever since.
I’ll take just one set of examples, we’ve done Do Things, we’ve done Run Things, we’ve
done Aspire To Run Things. We incubate organizations, companies, charities, public
sector organizations and political movements - and when they are big enough to stand
on their own two feet we kick them out the front door. And we’ve created about 80 so far.
And I’ve given you some examples here, some of their work just from the area of
education which of course, if you are obsessed with the damage that inequality does,
then one of the first areas you’re going to look at is education. So in education we’ve
created the things that I’ve put on this list, as well as many others and let me give you
one example here, the first two, the national extension college was something which
allowed people to study at a distance for school subject that weren’t available at their
local school and it was a pilot for the Open University. What we did with the Open
University was start to get the spare time of academics and use it to teach working age
people, who never had the opportunity to go to higher education. At that time in the late
50s early 60s in the UK 4% of the population got to go to University and he thought that
that was missing out on a huge opportunity for fulfilment and flourishing that people had
beyond the 4%. He got to the point where he had many, many, many people being taught
by various academics from various universities, and some of them had got to the point,
and when they were ready to graduate and he went first to Cambridge University and
then to London University and said “I’d like you to give these people degrees. And they
said “you must be joking, if you think that we are going to devalue the quality of our elite
degrees by giving it to these working age people, who have been studying at night for
these last years and years, then you are out of your mind.” So, he was forced to set up
his own University, which now has something like half a million students. And of course
that was part of the movement, which he was a part of, to drive up the idea that more
than 4% of the population should go to University. It’s very strange when we go and visit
the open University now, we’re an organization of only 50 people and the open University
employs 11,000 academics and yet they still treat us a bit like a parent: a very, very, very
small parent - it’s a strange relationship.
We also set up WHERE, which was an organization to help people work out where they
could get education and also WHICH, the Consumer Association which at the time was
a very radical idea that you should put more information into the hands of consumers to
allow them to choose more intelligently products. It was a legally dangerous thing to do
at the time but of course it has now become part of the landscape.
We’re looking now at how you might revisit consumer movements and ask this question:
Why is it that we can’t use our consumer power to put pressure on organizations where
the pay differential is five or six hundred to one between the senior executives and the
frontline workers, rather than twenty to one, or thirty to one, as it was in a period of
greatest economic growth in our country. Why is it that we couldn’t use the power of
women consumers who are the principal purchases in many sectors to put pressure on
those companies to pay equal pay to men and women? It’s a fascinating thing, I don’t
know what’s happening here in Portugal, but certainly in the UK the gains that we made
on gender equality, in particular on pay, has started to go backward now, so it’s a kind
of lagging indicator. So, long after we’ve started seeing pay inequality going backwards
we started to see gender inequality going backwards in the last couple of years. So, we
now started to see an increasing gap between what men and women are paid.
Michael Young often said the opposite of inequality is not equality, and people
traditionally attack those who argue against inequality by saying, you know, if you want
equality what you really arguing for some kind of, you know, Stalinism, where everybody
has to wear grey overalls, which of course is ridiculous. The opposite of inequality is what
we used to call fraternity. It’s an idea that people are interdependent and that there are
a million different ways to flourish and be successful, and not the increasingly narrow
and errant and consumerist ideas of success that we’ve started to impose on people in
recent years based on this kind of individualism of the striving soul. Young wrote a book
called “The Rise of Meritocracy” and he said, what he invented the term meritocracy, in
fact, to criticize it. And watch out if you ever get to the situation where people who are
rich and powerful think that they achieved that because of their own individual effort and
intelligence, because there will be no holding them back, he said, at least with aristocrats
they have some sense of embarrassment about the pure chance which had made them
powerful and wealthy; that sense of embarrassment gave them often times a sense of
obligation to the communities that they lived in. Meritocrats do not feel that, they are
under the illusion that they themselves individually have created the wealth and the
power that they have achieved, and they’ve been persuaded.. or persuaded themselves
somehow to ignore the people that have worked for them, or where those people came
from, and how they were educated, and how they got transported, and how their health
was cared for, and how the intellectual property that they benefited from was protected
and so on and so forth, and everything else that we as a society did to create the systems
and infrastructures that made them rich.
So that’s a little bit of what we’ve done and I won’t go into some of these areas unless
one of you is so desperate to stay here even later this evening to hear about what we’re
doing in financial services or gender or health, with cities or places and regions, or indeed
with the Europe lab, where we’re looking and trying to disrupt the strategies to make
Europe more accountable and transparent.
I’m going to finish with something that our Director of Places says whenever he’s talking
to the political leadership of a city or region, and he says it on the basis of the authority
that he worked on the strategy of the regeneration of the Basque region for the last 20
years, one of the most successful socioeconomic transformations of the last century.
And he always starts by saying “the history of a place is a set of decisions you have to
make, not a set of facts” and what he means by that, is that not that you should make up
a fairy-tale about your past but that we are trapped in a story that we tell ourselves about
our history and about our place and about our identity. And in the Basque case, what he
said was “the story that we had was one of industrial decline, mass unemployment, the
end of… no more steel industry, no more ship building industry, violence, terrorism,
warfare, depression. And we decided to retell our history to ourselves using our culture
and our music and our architecture and many other political and social strategies as one
of resilience and determination, creativity and reconciliation. He’d come out a
background of having cofounded the Basque peace movement and it was on the basis
of that new story that they decided to reinvent the former manufacturing industry as a
new advanced manufacturing industry, which has become the second largest centre of
advanced manufacturing in the world.
When I wander around Lisbon in Portugal, which is a place that I truly love, I have these
very
mixed
feelings
because
the
extraordinary
history
of
creativity
and
entrepreneurialism, of aspiration, of determination, of resilience and music and food, that
was so eloquently talked about in the previous presentation, and how can a country that
consumes that many pastéis de Belém possibly fail to meet the challenges which the
new economy has presented it with.
So, I’m profoundly optimistic that this rising up of this growth, of this bubbling up, of social
innovation and social entrepreneurialism which we see now in Portugal, which is so
exciting, is a sign of great things to come. I don’t underestimate the complexity of the
challenge, but really, I’d like to know what the alternative is.
I’m going to leave you with one final thought. Of course wandering around Lisbon and
thinking about that extraordinary man Diogo Vasconcelos, I was thinking, he sort of
summed up a lot of what I was trying to capture, he was of course an innovator, an
entrepreneur, he was a strange political mix, I think, formally speaking, he came from
the conservative end of the political spectrum and yet most of his friends seem to be
from the Communist sector, you know, he was a very complex individual but above all
he was completely and unstoppably optimistic. His favourite catchphrase was “Let’s put
them out on the moon“. I never had a clue of what he actually had in mind specifically,
but that’s the spirit that I try to carry with me.
Thanks very much for listening.