Why is financial growth leading to less jobs and increasing social inequality, and how exactly do innovative companies contribute towards this process? Technology and financial services companies, which have been championed by the government as ‘wealth creators’ and drivers of economic development, actually employ very few people relative to the revenue they generate. Take Facebook, whose 4000 employees were dwarfed by the vast US $104 billion valuation placed upon the company when it floated on the stock market. The long term consequences for Britain, in which the gains of innovation are so highly concentrated and where financial ‘success’ is accompanied by rising levels of unemployment, are unclear.

At Future Human’s Destructive Innovation salon we asked whether the public and political class’s obsession with ‘growth’ is quixotic, and volleyed questions with policy makers who help shape government economic strategy: Birgitte Andersen of the Big Innovation Centre, Geoff McCormick of The Alloy, and Albert Bravo-Biosca of Nesta. Could the Coalition’s faith in high-tech, high growth companies be fundamentally flawed? And is the cost of disruptive innovation the unraveling of British society and its treasured public institutions?

Searching for answers, host Ben Beaumont-Thomas travels to the London headquarters of Nesta, ‘the innovation foundation’ that funds projects across the creative industries, science and technology. He talks once more to their Senior Economist Albert Bravo-Biosca, and is joined by John Rapley, an international economist and correspondent for Foreign Affairs magazine, and Future Human’s founder Jack Gwilym Roberts. They discuss the troubling implications of bubble economics, the power of social enterprise and the paradoxical nature of ‘creative destruction’. Listen below via Soundcloud, or listen in iTunes.