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Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality and changing lives for the better. We use our expertise, skills and funding in areas where there are big challenges facing society.

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Innovation Sweet Spots: food innovation, obesity and food environments

This project started in May 2022 and ended in February 2023

How can we better understand emerging food technologies?

There is currently significant interest and investment within food innovation from lab-grown meat to personalised nutrition and digital tech for weight loss. In this project, we aimed to cut through the hype to better understand what advances in such technologies might mean for Nesta and others working on public health.

This Innovation Sweet Spots project supports the mission’s goal of halving the incidence of obesity in the UK by 2030 by providing insights about emerging food innovation that could help us reach this goal.

Our work builds on the previous Innovation Sweet Spots project, which investigated green technologies with the potential to decarbonise home heating. We also explored further datasets and foresight techniques for making sense of our findings.

What did we do?

The Discovery Hub has developed the Innovation Sweet Spots approach in order to help Nesta to trace the buzz around a technology or innovation back to the source, allowing us to critically interpret signals and make more informed calls about which innovations are close to a tipping point where they will have impact in the real world.

We analysed large quantitative datasets related to research activities, private investment and public discourse that are commonly only considered in isolation. By bringing these together we built a multi-dimensional picture of innovations and technologies.

We also carried out a further analytical or 'sensemaking' stage involving a broad range of stakeholders including early stage investors, scientists, health practitioners and policymakers. This involved the use of several strategic foresight techniques. Combining data analytics and foresight enabled us to better identify how the different innovations may impact Nesta’s healthy lives mission of halving obesity by 2030.