A week of celebration at the RSA

The RSA announces its new Action and Research Centre on the week of 10 September. RSA ARC will build on the Society’s success over the last five years in creating a unique programme of work combining practical experimentation with rigorous research.

Since its beginnings in the heat of the Industrial Revolution, the RSA has been inspired by the belief that the best way to meet our many challenges is to unleash the human potential for enterprise, innovation and creativity. That belief has inspired our unique network of RSA Fellows in areas such as schooling, industry, environment, and public sector reform amongst many others.

RSA ARC is driven by the conviction that we are living through a period  which could prove to be just as exciting and just as fraught with risk as the era in which the RSA was founded.  New technologies and the drive of a new generation of entrepreneurs is remaking our world and opening up great prospects for business, public services and education.  Insights from the worlds of design, psychology and the arts add to the sense of dynamism and progress.

The context may be new but the belief in releasing human potential as the key to seizing new opportunities remains undimmed.

This conviction can be seen in the scale and inventiveness of the new projects being announced this Autumn by the Centre. 

• The Great Recovery is a major partnership with the Government’s Technology Strategy Board to use design thinking to create new enterprises in the sphere of closed loop manufacturing. 
• A network for entrepreneurs under thirty will allow young business people to secure support from the RSA’s unique range of assets. 
• Community Campus will see the RSA help drive the radical decentralisation and restructuring of public services in Wiltshire. 
• And the RSA will now be helping deliver drug and alcohol recovery services in Kent in accord with our influential Whole Person Recovery principles.

In these and all other practical work, RSA ARC will seek to learn and share lessons which can allow the innovative practices behind these projects to be applied elsewhere.

In this spirit, ARC will also soon be publishing the final reports of:

• The RSA/Pearson Commission on academy schools;
• the Citizen Power Peterborough programme;
• the Connected Communities project on social networks and well-being.

We will also publish the initial report from a major new programme on austerity and public sector innovation in November.

The RSA ARC website will go live on 11 September and can be accessed through the RSA's main website.

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