Sir Geoff Mulgan
Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation
University College London (UCL)
Geoff Mulgan has worked in governments, civil society, philanthropy, investment and academia and is currently a Professor at University College London (UCL), in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Policy team (STEaPP) in the engineering department. Previously, he was Chief Executive of Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation (2011-2019), and from 1997-2004 he had roles in the UK government including director of the Government’s Strategy Unit, director of the Performance and Innovation Unit and head of policy in the Prime Minister’s office. From 2004-2011 he was first CEO of the Young Foundation. Geoff has been a reporter on BBC TV and radio and was the founder/co-founder of many organisations, including Demos, Uprising, the Social Innovation Exchange, the Australia Centre for Social Innovation and Action for Happiness. He has overseen commercial venture funds as well as impact investment funds since his first job as an investment officer in Greater London Enterprise. He has a PhD in telecommunications and has been visiting professor at LSE and Melbourne University, and is a senior visiting scholar at Harvard University.
Geoff has advised many governments, businesses, NGOs and foundations around the world, including work in the Prime Minister’s team in Australia and teaching leaders around the world, including at the China Executive Leadership Academy and the Harvard Kennedy School. He is a senior fellow with Demos Helsinki and was a senior fellow at the New Institute in Hamburg (2020-2022) and a World Economic Forum Schwab Fellow (2019-22). He recently chaired a European Commission programme on ‘Whole of Government Innovation’ and co-founded TIAL, The Institutional Architecture Lab. He is a board member of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. At UCL he teaches courses on engineering, social change, and AI in government.
Past books include ‘Good and Bad Power’ (Penguin, 2005), ‘The Art of Public Strategy’ (Oxford University Press, 2008), ‘The Locust and the Bee’ (Princeton University Press, 2012), ‘Big Mind: how collective intelligence can change our world’ (Princeton University Press, 2017), ‘Social innovation: how societies find the power to change’ (Policy Press, 2019), ‘Prophets at a Tangent: how art shapes social imagination’ (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and ‘When Science Meets Power’ (Polity, 2023/24). His books have been translated into over twenty languages including Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Malay, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Urdu, Greek, Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Finnish and Swedish. His book ‘Advanced Guide to Public Sector Innovation’ is published by Edward Elgar in April 2026, and ‘Exploratory Social Science’ by Oxford University Press later in the year.
He is a founding joint editor-in-chief of the journal Collective Intelligence (Sage/ACM). Many of the ideas Geoff has worked on have gone onto become mainstream, from creative economy strategies to social investing, open data to collective intelligence, experimental and evidence-based government to policies for well-being and challenge-driven innovation. Geoff has given TED talks on the future economy, happiness and education. His website is geoffmulgan.com. He has a CBE and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2020.
