An Australian Social Inventions competition

I gather that The Book of Visions must be going well in the UK bacause there are not yet copies spare for the bookshops here in Australia. I had several interstate radio interviews about the book - Darwin, Hobart, Launceston, Perth, Adelaide and Sydney (this last with one of the big names in chat shows) including one talk-back, which immediately got people ringing in with social inventions. Curiously, no ideas from Melbourne. Perhaps they could not stand the Female Urinals idea. Melbournians are a bit cautious about anything Not Quite. We have started an Australian Social Inventions competition, with $1,000 dollars in prizes and a deadline of October 3rd '93.

As for Clavell Blount's suggestion of government encouragement of ideas through an intermediary body set up with the CBI and the TUC, my comment is: Avoid like the plague turning anything into a government instrumentality if you can avoid it. It immediately bureaucratises. You can just imagine how an intermediary agency would proliferate in Parkinsonian manner. It would be far better to give the Institute for Social Inventions £1,000 a year for competition prize moeny and £1,000 a year to help organise it and to help entrants.