THE GLOBAL IDEAS BANK

Your Ideas Wanted for the Global Ideas Bank!

An International Suggestion Box for socially innovative non-technological ideas and projects, with £1,000 UK sterling awards annually for the best ideas or projects submitted

collected by the non-profit charity Institute for Social Inventions, London, England.

Feedback and more ideas are very welcome. This Global Ideas Bank is not at present for patentable ideas or technological ideas or other product-based ideas - more for ideas concerning suggested new services, organisations, laws, constitutions, procedures, ways to relate, ways to solve problems, etc. All ideas will automatically be entered for the annual awards (deadline June 1st each year); and be aware that all ideas submitted may be freely edited and used in this Global Ideas Bank and in the Institute for Social Inventions' various publications. Send up to a thousand words, adding which section your idea should go in. If your idea is already available on the World Wide Web, please send simply an abstract of the idea (up to 100 words) with an http reference. Please always give your name, address, telephone and fax number and e-mail address, to Nicholas Albery at rhino@dial.pipex.com.

Categorized Sections

Ideas from different sources and publications are here organized in lists by category.

  1. Social Innovations - Past and Present
  2. Children and Education
  3. Relationships
  4. Housing
  5. New Money Systems & Financial Innovations
  6. Taxation
  7. Work & Unemployment
  8. Economics and Business
  9. Welfare
  10. Crime & The Law
  11. Health & Therapy
  12. Neighbourhood
  13. Environment and Ecology
  14. Quality of Life
  15. Science, Technology and Energy
  16. Transport
  17. Communications
  18. Arts, Leisure & Lifestyle
  19. International and Developing World
  20. War & Peace
  21. Politics
  22. Spirituality
  23. Old Age
  24. Death and Dying
  25. Promoting Social Inventions

Look at a Random Idea

Search for idea titles with keyword

Ratings

As you are browsing through the ideas, you have the opportunity to rate how well you like each one. The ratings are stored and tabulated to show which ideas are the most popular.

As of 07/01/96, 9023 people have produced 13315 ratings of 1062 ideas out of 1123.

These are currently the most highly rated ideas:

TitleRating# Ratings
Star teachers only on video or cassette100%1
Newsletters during conference sessions100%1
How are the Institute's forecasts for the nineties getting o100%1
Group homes for elderly people from black and racial minorit100%1
$75,000 awards for computer welfare projects100%1
What rights should local areas have?100%1
The Network for Social Change98%8
Sustrans' 5,000 miles of cycle paths98%61
Curitiba and its visionary mayor97%28
Nature reserves with homes for the retired97%8
Sholver Rangers97%8
Auction of Promises: how to raise L16,000 in one evening97%4
Orangi slum transformed by street committees and small loans97%4
£30m Earth Centre in Yorkshire97%4
The Gyrotron - a human-sized gyroscope97%15
Microwaving waste less polluting than incineration96%16
Rights for Swedish animals96%9
Village Aid96%6
Mouth organs for every child96%6
Greensat96%6

Other ratings and statistics

Published Books On-Line

These are collections of ideas published by the Institute for Social Inventions. All of these ideas are organized by category above.

The Global Suggestions Box is an online development of
The Book of Visions

An Encyclopaedia of Social Innovations

Edit ed by

Nicholas Albery

Assisted by
Valerie Yule

Foreword by>
Anita Roddick

The Book of Visions encyclopaedia was first published in Great Britain in 1992 by

Virgin Books

an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd

The material was collected, typeset, laid out and reprinted in 1995 by

Institute for Social Inventions

20 Heber Road
London NW2 6AA
tel 0181 208 2853
fax 0181 452 6434

Copyright © Institute for Social Inventions 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996

All royalties from these books go to the Institute for Social Inventions, a registered educational charity, towards its workshops in schools and other activities. The Institute is grateful to all the hundreds of people around the world who freely contributed items and is apologetic to any whom it failed to trace or acknowledge.

The Global Ideas Bank, the online version of The Book of Visions encylopaedia, is made available subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any paper form or with any binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent publisher.

The Book of Visions has been published on the Web with the help of Flemming Funch
and the New Civilization Network.