Ideas banks

The model was pioneered by the Institute of Social Invention in the UK. Its director, Nicholas Albery founded the Institute in 1985. Albery produced regular editions of the Book of Social Inventions and the Book of Visions, and in 1995 he launched the Global Ideas Bank – an online repository of ideas and experiences. The site has a database of 4000 ideas online, receives a quarter of a million visitors a year and of those, 160,000 voted for an idea. The Global Ideas Bank has helped spawn a number of similar sites, including the Norwegian Ideas Bank (which focuses mainly on issues of environmental sustainability) and Idea a Day (the top 500 ideas are published in the Big Idea Book edited by the site’s creator David Owen). One new initiative is My Health Innovation, a website which enables people to make suggestions for improving their healthcare systems. These sites include a vast array of ideas - everything from the brilliant to the downright absurd. But even when ideas are evidently excellent, there is no method for turning ideas into action.