//TRENDS//The big picture: what Europe is doing and why

Alberto Cottica

D4SB Master Course

From opportunity assessment to business planning in social businessLesson 4

Demographic trends in some European countries, unweighted averagesSource: World Bank

0

15

30

45

60

1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008

% of working-age population

% of population ages 65 and above

• health care costs rising +8% per year since 1998 in Sweden

• health care costs rising +6.4% per year in France

• 13% of the workforce in the Netherlands is classified as sick or disabled (2004)

• health care costs are 15% of GDP in the USA (2004): expected to reach $ 3.4 trillion, or 18% of GDP, by 2013

Rising costs of welfare

Baumol’s diseaseservices don’t scale: productivity stagnates compared to that of manufacturing

The powers that be are getting worried....

Different systems have different takes

European Initiative for Social Innovation

Council of Europe advisory group

Social Innovation Coalition

Think tanks: NESTA, Young Foundation...

Large investments: Social Innovation Park in Bilbao

The Big Society: http://thebigsociety.co.uk/

An unprecedented opportunity for social business

... but also turf & definition wars

Keywords: decentralization

Keywords: inclusion

Keywords: mutuality/reciprocality

Keywords: technology

• Find and discuss data on demographic trends and rising costs of welfare

• Identify a social business opportunity and look for the data to back it up

• write a blog post/wikipedia entry on the British Big Society

• write a blog post/wikipedia entry on another concept for tackling the same problem

Assignments!