Charles Leadbeater

The forces driving modern competitiveness

The nature of modern entrepreneurship

Leading and structuring knowledge driven companies

Why good managers find innovation painful

The changing nature of innovation in a global economy

How companies can mobilise consumers as co-creators and innovators   

By this Author

Charlie Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and strategy, and is one of the most influential creative people in the world. He has advised companies, cities and governments, and is former Prime Minister Tony Blair's favourite corporate thinker.

We-think, his latest book, charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation. It is one of several acclaimed books; Living on Thin Air, a guide to living and working in the new economy; Up the Down Escalator, an attack on the culture of public pessimsim accompanying globalisation and In Search of Work which was one of the first books to predict the rise of more flexible and networked forms of employment. He has also written extensively and influentially on the case for more personalised, participative approaches to education, most recently a report entitled What’s Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Education.

In 2002 he was listed by GQ magazine as one of the Most Powerful Men in the UK. The New York Times anointed Charlie’s idea, The Pro-Am Revolution, as one of the biggest global ideas of 2004. In 2005 Charlie was ranked by Accenture, the global management consultancy, as one of the 30 top management thinkers in the world. In 2007 the Financial Times ranked him the outstanding innovation expert in the UK, and in 2008, the Spectator Magazine described him as "the wizard of the web".

Charlie has worked as a senior adviser to several governments on the rise of the knowledge driven economy, the Internet, and on future strategies for more networked and personalised approaches to learning and education. The UK Government has turned to him for advice on policy issues ranging from health and education to climate change and culture. He was one of the first Europeans to advise the Chinese government.

Charlie has advised the European Commission, working as a special adviser on Competitiveness and the New Economy. In the run up to the EU’s Lisbon summit in 2000, he wrote the draft report presented at the Lisbon summit: “The New Economy: The European Model.”

As a Senior Associate with the influential London think tank Demos, Charlie leads the Atlas of Ideas programme which is exploring the international dynamics of innovation. The Atlas programme has produced reports on India, China, South Korea, Brazil and the Islamic world.

He has advised a long list of organisations on innovation strategy, including the BBC, Vodafone, Microsoft, Cisco and Accenture. He is a regular speaker at major corporate and governmental conferences: recent engagements include Tetra Pak, Google, Linklaters and Barclays.