I was shocked and deeply saddened to receive the news of the sudden and untimely death of Diogo Vasconcelos earlier today.

I had the privilege to work with him in his roles as a Distinguished Fellow at Cisco, founding Chair of the Dialogue Café, founding chair of the Social Innovation eXchange, and as a great friend of the Young Foundation. Diogo was passionate about life, human progress and social innovation in particular. I knew him over a period of four years although I can't claim to have known him all that well or to have spent that much time with him in total. The intensity with which he engaged with projects we worked together on, and the enthusiasm, curiosity and creativity he brought to bear, seems somehow to make up for our lack of accumulated hours together. The breadth of knowledge and the bounds of his curiosity were unbelievably broad. I often left an encounter with Diogo feeling a desperate need to log on to Amazon to explore the lateral connections he had made or to catch up with a new trend or meme he had spotted. He was a great entrepreneur, innovator and ambassador for social innovation bringing an incredible vision, energy and creativity together with an ability to get things done. Yet he remained a humble and gentle man. He will be hugely missed by people in so many different fields and countries.

As the founding Chairman of the Social Innovation eXchange, he helped us build the network from a handful of enthusiasts to a global community of over 3,000 individuals and organisations with an influential role in shaping the European Commission's approach to innovation. He was instrumental in persuading the European Commission to make social innovation a priority within the European Union. In 2009 he chaired the Business Panel on Future EU innovation policy, set up by the European Commission, whose report called for a radical change in European innovation policies to refocus around pressing social needs. The Commission took his recommendations seriously in framing the proposed approach to innovation set out in the Innovation Union. At the time of his death he was involved in advising our Social Innovation Europe programme.

He also chaired the Dialogue Café, a social enterprise that is creating a global network of cafes linked by high definition screens so that ordinary people from different cultures can meet, talk and create together. It is through Diogo that the mainly European participants gathered at the last SIX Spring School in Amsterdam were able to connect with and be inspired by participants ofthe Arab Spring from Egypt, Tunisia and the Gulf.

Diogo achieved all this whilst being a Distinguished Fellow with Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), the global strategy and innovation group of Cisco.In this position,   he worked on the role of ICTs in fighting climate change and promoting energy efficiency, on sustainable prosperity and on the role of next generation broadband to foster innovation among other things. It is a tribute to Diogo, and to the credit of Cisco, that he was able to achieve all this whilst based not within the public sector or an NGO, but in a multinational company. He was an exemplar of his own prediction that as the field of social innovation develops we will see the convergence of the private, public and social sectors.

More importantly than any of these achievements, Diogo was a man who cared about the basic decencies that matter in life. He had an unerring ability to leave you feeling inspired and uplifted. He was a role model and mentor for those who worked with him. He took a keen interest in developing and guiding talented young people and although he knew many influential and powerful people, he never considered himself too important to give advice and encouragement to anyone who sought it. Nor did he take himself too seriously, and at the several international events that I was involved in with Diogo, he always found a way to inject some humour and fun into proceedings. For all these reasons, so many of those who worked with him and for him considered him not just a colleague, but a friend. I count myself lucky to have been amongst them.

A full profile of Diogo Vasconcelos can be found here.

Simon Tucker
8th July 2011