Residencies can be a powerful tool for injecting a jolt of new thinking or helping organisations to test out a new approach. Here we share practical tips from the Discovery Hub’s experience of trialling this approach at Nesta over the last three years. 

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It’s no secret that all organisations, however innovative, drift towards ‘path dependency’ over time – these are the kinds of routines, behaviours and team practices which can become self-reinforcing cultural loops. Established ways of doing things give us stability, but over time this predictability can start to inhibit dynamism and make organisations vulnerable to groupthink.

If, like us, your strategy involves searching for novel solutions to entrenched social problems, then it is vital to tap into cutting-edge thinking from outside your existing networks. One way we have been doing this is through collaborations with expert residents working towards similar goals. These individuals bring first-hand knowledge of working in early years settings, accelerating heat pump adoption or building prototypes with generative AI – and we combine this with our own expertise across our missions and Nesta’s platform for social change. This sparks the creation of new collaborations, products and new paths to impact.

The core model of a residency is hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Over this time they have taken many forms, but commonly involve transplanting an individual to new surroundings or within a community to allow for experimentation and the interchange of ideas and practices. 

Historically, residencies are most associated with the arts (for example, artist colonies such as Worpswede in Germany and numerous writer-in-residence programmes in cultural institutions) but the term also has roots in the sciences. A ‘residency’ is a period of in-house training for medical students in the US, whilst scientists-in-residence schemes exist to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. 

Whilst the emphasis has often been on an individual pursuing their own research or practice, or perhaps entering into a creative dialogue with an institution or a place, more recently, there has been an uptick in residencies designed to change the organisation itself or impact the wider community. 

For example, the Bellagio Center Residency Program from the Rockefeller Foundation is an example of the residency being used as an innovation and community-building method to help individuals create breakthroughs. The practice has entered the policymaking sphere, as residencies have sprung up inside local government in the US and also in Whitehall, via the UK’s PolicyLab experiments.

We wanted to push the possibilities for impact further, to see if we could redirect this mechanism towards highly applied problems in our missions. 

Whilst we have remained true to the core principle underpinning a residency (ie, embedding someone with deep expertise in-house for a defined period of knowledge exchange), our approach is framed around specific briefs, targeted joint areas of exploration or demonstrator products.

We have now hosted nine residents, and have three key tips that we think are useful for other organisations interested in trying something similar.

As we have seen, there are now a diverse array of models for residencies from across the social, public and private sector. It might seem tempting to mix-and-match different components from other schemes to create a blended, best-of-all-worlds design, but it’s critical to keep a laser focus on the core goal at the heart of yours.

Trying to meet too many aims simultaneously only sows confusion and disappointment on both sides.

For instance, while it was tempting at the outset to position Nesta residencies as a professional development opportunity for early-career professionals, we realised we didn’t have the resources to develop a learning curriculum which could meet the needs of those applying. In the past, Nesta has provided capacity building support for individual creative entrepreneurs – but this kind of model no longer aligns with our strategy.

Key to maximising the success of a residency was getting aligned around a sharply defined brief or demonstrator product. This provided a sense of focus and purpose, alongside creating more general opportunities for cross organisational knowledge transfer, such as lunch and learn sessions, hackathons and team presentations.

For us, the residency programme was a chance to get closer to the frontline and examine the problems we work on from new angles. For example, how to practically start making school food healthier across all of Wales.

By definition, our residents were rarely operating in exactly the same fields as our staff – we couldn’t expect them to have heard of Nesta. 

In our outreach, we knew we needed to push beyond our usual networks to ensure we met applicants where they already were. In our first residency intake, we found our heat pump expert-in-residence through posting the opportunity in a private LinkedIn group for UK-based heat pump installers. 

We’ve also found recruitment success by leveraging partner’s networks, as well as targeting industry specific jobs board and newsletters. 

We explicitly state in our open calls that we value diverse lived experiences and are keen to hear from individuals with non-traditional career paths. This approach has helped us attract a wider range of talented individuals who bring fresh perspectives.

Embedding an individual within an organisation and expecting to see immediate results or impact is unrealistic. 

Whilst they may not be joining on a permanent basis, we’ve seen just how important it is to support residents with a thorough orientation, onboarding and team engagement opportunities. This helps to build trust, giving the resident a clearer picture of the problems we’re grappling with and creating opportunities for our staff to start drawing on their expertise on an ad-hoc basis.

Without these elements, the work initiated by the resident can lose momentum once they leave. This is particularly true for residents working on novel or experimental projects which require specialist technical expertise. We've learned the importance of providing a host team to support the resident and are now exploring integrating a buddying element, to sustain knowledge exchange. Tactics such as these help create an ‘afterlife’ for the residency.

The residency model need not be confined to academia or artistic practice. We know innovative breakthroughs often emerge from the collision of ideas from different fields and collaborations between experts in adjacent fields (for example, bioinformatics emerged from the intersection between computer science and biology). 

As an applied innovation method, residencies can be a very human, relational way to shift culture and help organisations to be more outward facing. Let us know your own experience of creating social change through a residency, fellowship or alumni network by contacting Celia Hannon.