Public Goods For The 21st Century

Nicholas Gruen explores the shape of public goods in the 21st century. The social economist talks about the importance of empathy and social capital in the constantly changing modern world.

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Nicholas Gruen is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur and commentator on economy, society and innovation.  He is CEO of Lateral Economics and Chair of: The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, Deakin University’s Arts Participation Incubator; and The Open Knowledge Foundation (Australia). And he chaired the Federal Government’s Innovation Australia 'til 2014.

Nicholas is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, comprising Australia’s libraries, universities, and providers of digital infrastructure such as Google and Yahoo. He is a Council Member of the National Library of Australia.

He was Chairman of successful San Francisco based data analytics crowdsourcing platform Kaggle.com and investor in numerous Australian and American startups. 

He has advised Cabinet Ministers, sat on Australia’s Productivity Commission (then Industry Commission and founded Lateral Economics and Peach Financial. He has had regular columns in various daily papers and published numerous essays on political, economic and cultural matters. 

In 2009 he chaired Australia’s internationally acclaimed Government 2.0 Taskforce.