Britain's new radicals show that the best ideas can't be stifled

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/may/11/britains-new-radicals-best-ideas-stifled-nesta

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There's an odd line in Plato's Symposium in which he writes that "everyone is pregnant". At first, it makes you think this otherworldly philosopher was a bit confused about the facts of life. What he was in fact trying to get across, through the voice of one of his characters, was the idea that we all contain within ourselves beautiful ideas, waiting to be born.

Sadly, most of those ideas never get much beyond a vague flicker of the synapses. When we first think of them, they seem too weird or unsettling and so we just get on with daily life and put the kettle on. Inertia also takes its toll. Thousands of people have good ideas, but only a fraction have the persistence and grit to make them happen.

The idea behind finding and celebrating Britain's new radicals was that we should shine a light on people who have not only given birth to great ideas, but also helped them crawl, walk and then run. That makes this an unusual list. There are plenty of lists of the richest, the most powerful, the most eligible and the most fanciable. But we thought it would be more interesting to uncover the people shaping the world, often below the radar, breaking new ground that might in time feed into how we all live our lives.

After all, our society gives a lot of credit and rewards, but mainly to a rather odd, even random, selection of celebrities, stars and bankers. It's a fair bet that historians looking back won't see many of them as all that worthy of attention. Indeed, quite a lot of them are eminently forgettable. By contrast, the people we're looking for are the ones who are worth knowing about and worth tracking.

Two years ago, Observer readers did a brilliant job nominating, advocating and pointing us to candidates. And they showed Britain in a different light, a bit like looking at a building with an infrared thermography lens, showing the warm bodies rather than the cold buildings around them.

Some of the hotspots involved radicals working with food – making it healthier, more local. A lot were concerned about waste – the vast heaps of detritus that come with an industrial civilisation, throwing away last year's iPad, or food that's past its sell-by date but otherwise perfectly edible. Many were using technology in creative ways, and one of the great things about the internet is that it makes it much easier to get going, to show an idea in prototype, because ideas are never born fully formed; they are always successive rough drafts.

The good news is that nearly all of them are thriving, radiating confidence and proving their resilience. As George Bernard Shaw put it, all progress depends on unreasonable people – people who are a bit bloody-minded, but also not content just to mouth off – and these are great examples.

Their ideas, like all of the best radical ideas, are both shocking and obvious. Everyone turning their homes into hotels or pooling cars. Turning cities into farms. Adapting fostering to older people. Turning patients into research scientists. Because they're shocking, such ideas are usually stifled. But because they are also, in their own way, obvious, in time they spread into daily life and stop being radical.

Now we're asking Observer readers to look again at who deserves to be learned from and given some oxygen to help them do even more. With the economy only now limping into recovery, and the public sector facing years of financial pressure, we badly need some usefully radical ideas. Help us find them.

Geoff Mulgan is chief executive of Nesta, an independent charity supporting innovation in the UK