Generally I felt Tuesday's Innovation Edge event played it a bit safe, but here are my notes of what I found to be the highlights. For once the 'star speakers' were truly stars.

Tim Berners-Lee interviewed by Jonathan Freedland

Didn't see the 'vague but exciting' comment until his boss died. Both men (Tim & boss) knew they had no remit to work on this, so boss didn't say yes, because he couldn't, but didn't exactly say no either.

Should employees be allowed to potter? 10-20% time is a good idea, but generally putting employees on a long leash to tackle problems. Don't expect people to tell you what solutions they're going to come up with before you give the support.

Apocryphal quote from Einstein 'If we knew what we were doing, we couldn't call it research'.

If the web is still in its infancy, what are your hopes for its adolescence and adulthood? Perhaps it's already a teenager, but I hope it will be responsible member of society We need to experiment with new ways of doing science and running society. I hope the web will support both of those.

Blogs are one of the things I call social machines. They're invented. That creates a large-scale phenomenon. A large number of wikis are created, and one of them happens to have grand ambitions. Blogs are what happens when people get into the blogosphere. People are behaving like adolescents and testing things out here, getting hurt sometimes, and hopefully maturing a lot.

The Web Science Research Initiative (Southampton University and MIT, part supported by NESTA). The really interesting things fell between stools of, say, psychology and economics. There are more web pages out there than are neurons in your brain. The web is big and complex, and we don't know what its properties are. How does the blogosphere interact with the press? Does it keep it honest? What if it flips, and hatred and rumour spreads faster than love and truth?

Would the web lose its spontaneity if you were try to pin it down? The key to understanding the web isn't pinning it down. Example of eBay as interaction between micro-level individual interactions and macro-level system that results,

Is the web more fragile than we realise? It's more subtle than that: will it be stable? Will it be a force for good? There are some reputable sources of medical information on the web. That's the good bit. Drug companies also produce some information that looks similar and may also be useful, but tends to conclude with a list of drugs. Will the web get pulled towards the latter? Email worked very well for a long time, and then commercial email became acceptable use, and there was a tipping point that you couldn't predict from the specs: thus spam.

Is innovation from now on going to be a collective rather than an individual endeavour? [Some not very articulate stuff about new ideas and words that people take on and spread] You can't ask people how they thought stuff up and expect an accurate answer. My goal for the web would be to enable that stitching of ideas when they are in different heads on different sides of the world.

Bob Geldof

Here's the full video. Great entrance.

Bono is short and fat, and I'm not. The power of unreasonable people (George Bernard Shaw), who find themselves uncomfortable in the world and persist in trying to change it. Thus is necessity the mother of invention, and desperation is the father of necessity.

The future will have terrible wars, terrible economic problems. History has shown that people are unteachable. In 01908, they had no inkling of the War, that flu would wipe out more than the War, or of the 01929 crash.

We turn to innovation because we're forced to in a period of change.

Business finds a way to make progress pay. But progress towards what? We can't have more of everything. We have to rearrange things. Everything is running out: air, water, time.

Social entrepreneurs are the people GBS was talking about. Examples of microloans in Bangladesh.

I'm Irish:I came here because Britain had that entrepreneurial culture. Ireland had this crouching deference to the UK. In the last quarter of the last century, the UK dominated in culture.

Tim B-L fits the British mandate, and you love him more because he didn't make any money out of his invention.

Daily Mail makes its living from contemptuous sneer at those who try and fail. I was just desperate, and a rock band is a classic cooperative entrepreneurial venture. NHS and Open University were created out of desperation. Can those institutions survive as they are: what kind of review and revision do they need.

Britain defines itself in opposition to almost everyone/anyone else.

You can't encourage the young to be entrepreneurial.Born not made.

Existential problems are looming in front of us. We are desperate. The political body doesn't give us solutions any more. The notion of leadership comes to your self.

I was innovating in charity. In the UK, you can't say 'charity' without saying 'chaaridee' or 'love' without 'lurve'. We are embarrassed about using these words without irony. Innovation may come from society not from the top: if enough people give to a charity, government policy has to adapt. And now organisations need talented people more than talented people need organisations, so the organisations have to change to attract them.

Helen Alexander: you have to worried all the time that the entrepreneurial spirit is fading. You have to keep an eye on it. But also allow for the fact that people can be successful without being entrepreneurs.

Are social networks the new cities?

Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council

Quick answer: no. Virtual world is an adjunct not a substitute for real world. Core of an innovative city is its innovative people: have to create space for them to be creative. Government has to know when to get out of the way and when not to. Organic processes + institutional processes to ensure that creative ideas come to something. Question of survival. Facilitate networks within the city: bringing people together in a physical space.

Jon Gisby, Channel 4

Collectively we're watching trillions of hours of TV, and that's not going away.Two big changes: 1) Rise of on-demand. 2) New expectations of an audience that can participate.

Michael Birch, Bebo

Moved to San Francisco because my wife is from there, and it happened to have a thriving IT community. The users were critical to the growth. We modelled Bebo on a city. Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City are not great, so we tried to avoid being too contrived.At the start, there's no one there so it doesn't matter how good the code is.