On May 9 we explored Destructive Innovation at the Future Human salon, the seemingly paradoxical idea that innovation could lead to inequal wealth distribution and even widespread joblessness. The hi-tech businesses being nurtured by government and private finance often employ few people relative to the revenues they generate, so how can we modify innovation to benefit more people in society?

John Rapley of the London School of Economics’ International Growth Centre gave our primer presentation looking at potential routes out, finding that we may either have to migrate to where opportunities lie (just as Portuguese are moving to Brazil, Angola and Mozambique) or mutate our current labour market to allow for more social enterprise. This provoked a forthright response from our panellists, some of which can be heard on a forthcoming episode of The Future Human Podcast. For now, if you want to learn more about our panellists and their work, Birgitte Andersen’s Big Innovation Centre project is here, Geoff McCormick’s design firm The Alloy is here and the Technology Strategy Board is here, and Nesta, the public-body-turned-charity that Albert Bravo-Biosca works at is here.

Thanks go out to our similarly innovation-obsessed friends at Abstrakt, a book-cum-magazine produced by Swiss thinktank W.I.R.E. that provided free copies for our salon attendees.

Below is a selection of the best Twitter discussion from the night. Future Human is off for two months, but will return in August for Smash Publishing, where we will discover how self-publishing authors are rewriting the financial model of the book industry. We’ll see you then!

Photography by Big Innovation