Sir Geoffrey John Mulgan CBE (born 1961) is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London (UCL).
[2] Mulgan worked for a spell in the 1980s as a van driver for the "Labour-supporting collective of musicians and comedians known as Red Wedge",[3] opting ultimately for a career in local government and academia in the UK as well as writing on social and political issues in various newspapers and magazines in the 1990s, including The Independent, the Financial Times, The Guardian, and the New Statesman.
He has been a board member of Big Society Capital and a trustee of charities including Action for Happiness; the Photographers' Gallery; Reimagine Europa; Luton Culture Trust; the Design Council, the Work Foundation, Crime Concern, and Political Quarterly, and a member of various committees for bodies including the European Commission, World Economic Forum, OECD, SITRA and the Academy of Medical Sciences.
He was profiled by the Daily Telegraph in January 2024, prompted by evidence that when in government he had tried to cancel the Horizon Post Office software which later caused a series of miscarriages of justice and a major scandal.
[10] Mulgan has written a number of books, including Communication and Control: Networks and the New Economies of Communication (1991), Politics in an Anti-Political Age (1994), Connexity (1997), Good and Bad Power: the Ideals and Betrayals of Government (Penguin, 2006), The Art of Public Strategy (2009), The Locust and the Bee (Princeton, 2013), Big Mind: how collective intelligence can change our world (Princeton, 2017); Social innovation: how societies find the power to change (Policy Press, 2019); Another World is Possible: how to reignite social and political imagination (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2022); and When Science Meets Power' (Polity Press, 2024).