FreshNetworks Blog

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world and the unreasonable man persists in adapting the world to himself”.

By this definition from George Bernard Shaw, Bob Geldof would call himself an unreasonable man. And he thinks the time is ripe for innovation; we are running out of things (air, land, oil and the likes) and so we need innovation to help us adapt. Everyone can have ideas and everyone does but they don’t exist out of time - they emerge if they are applicable to the moment. This is what we’re seeing and business needs to support and push these appropriate ideas forward.

For Geldof, social entrepreneurs are the real unreasonable men. He gives the examples of Professor Mohammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, who brought micro-finance to Bangladesh. With initial loans of $5 to 27 people he has taken 100s of millions of people out of poverty. This was an innovation that was rejected by the big banks and the corporates but that has had a profound impact and change in Bangladesh and across the world.

He thinks that the UK needs to encourage this kind of entrepreneurship more. Fund research of the type Berners-Lee was talking about; research where we don’t know why we’re doing it. Geldof thinks we need to celebrate failure and the attempt at trying - without this we will not get real innovation.

Here all of Geldof’s speech here.