We are working to ensure that our missions are actively considering and measuring the impact of our work on minoritised and disadvantaged groups throughout the entire innovation process.

EDI is embedded throughout all three of our missions; a healthy life, a sustainable future and a fairer start. Across all our work, we aim to generate the greatest impact for the greatest number of people, disproportionately benefiting people of minoritised and disadvantaged backgrounds.

This means our work must consider the diverse experiences of minoritised and disadvantaged communities in how we prioritise, design, test and scale solutions – even if those solutions may be aimed at more advantaged people. For example, in our sustainable future mission, while the long-term impact of decarbonisation will disproportionately benefit those with disadvantaged backgrounds, most of our projects are focused on the shorter-term aim of increasing takeup of heat pumps among (typically more advantaged) homeowners. Still, our aim is to take a nuanced and intersectional approach to designing and testing solutions in this space, so as to ensure our work is scalable and can ultimately have a positive impact on the greatest number of people.

At a minimum, all of our work goes through an ethics and quality assurance forum named EMERALD (early stage methods, ethics, resourcing and legal discussion), who meet weekly. In this forum, we reflect equity and inclusion in our project plans, discuss potential areas of bias and consider additional steps we might take to ensure we do no harm to minoritised groups. In addition, we have developed three methods to help project teams understand and consider the impact that our work might have on the minoritised communities that we work with.

Firstly, we used a set of EDI prompts to help teams think through how minoritised groups may be affected by decisions made across the different stages of the project, and ensure mission teams are actively considering and mitigating potential negative impacts from the project-design stage. Many of our projects – particularly in the fairer start mission – also involve parents and families affected by poverty in research advisory groups and qualitative design work to inform the scope and progress of a project from start to end.

Secondly, we have established a standardised approach for collecting project and research participants’ demographic data in a consistent and appropriate way that is sensitive to the nuances of identity and the wide range of lived experiences people may have.

Thirdly, we have integrated EDI into our overarching impact measurement framework, through an equalities impact assessment (EIA),scoring each project from one to five based on the extent to which each project considers and has a positive impact on minoritised groups. To date, we have assessed 41 completed projects across the three missions using our EIA criteria and the results of where our projects score are listed below.

The majority of our higher-scoring projects are focused on achieving our a fairer start mission, a mission that is explicitly focused on supporting parents and children from disadvantaged backgrounds. On the other hand, the majority of the projects that score a one or a two are desk research projects or those focused on achieving our a sustainable future mission, where the long-term impact of decarbonisation will disproportionately benefit those with disadvantaged backgrounds, but where most of our projects are focused on the shorter-term aim of increasing takeup of heat pumps amongst typically more advantaged homeowners.

What’s next?

Defining these assessments required balancing rigour and simplicity so that the assessment could be quickly replicated across projects but still provide us with meaningful results. We expect that our approach to doing so will evolve over time as the missions grow in size, scale and complexity, and will be evaluating whether further iteration in our approach is necessary next year.

In addition, we will be looking in more detail at our projects with an EIA score of one, to learn whether there is more we can be doing to consider the impact of our work on minoritised communities from the start.

We aim to equitably distribute investments among businesses founded and run by minoritised groups.

Goal five of our EDI strategy sets out that “by 2025, 25% of our investees and 50% of our suppliers will be led by people from minoritised and disadvantaged groups.” The intention behind this goal is to drive EDI impact through our non-staff expenditure and to bring Nesta in line with best practice for large companies.

We manage our investment and supply-chain targets separately. In investments, we’re seeing really positive progress. Nesta Impact Investments has made seven mission-aligned investments to date with two further investments that have been approved but not yet completed. Of these, five are led by women and one founder is visually impaired. This represents 67% of our portfolio, more than double our target of 25%. As well as this, Nesta Impact Investments was accredited as a Level 2 fund as part of the Diversity VC Standard, which is the highest possible rating for funds committed to best practice around EDI in the venture capital industry.

Mission Studio, a partnership between Nesta and Founders Factory, creates, spins out and scales new tech startups that tackle some of the UK’s most pressing social challenges. The studio aims to drive forward Nesta’s three missions: a fairer start, a healthy life and a sustainable future. In the Mission Studio, six venture concepts have been spun out by the Investment Committee and another venture concept approved (yet to spin out) and we have recruited seven founders and six co-founders. Five of these twelve leaders are women or from minoritised ethnic backgrounds, and we are exploring new approaches to attract more women candidates to founder and co-founder roles for our remaining ventures.

What’s next?

We’re committed to improving the representation of our founders so have set recruitment targets on inbound (candidates apply) and outbound (we approach candidates) applications for minoritised groups. Alongside recruitment efforts, our focus will be to collaborate with our design and technology practice to kick off founder training on inclusive design, and assess what support founders require to improve their awareness and capability on EDI whilst growing their own teams.

Our objective is to equitably distribute our corporate spend and investments among businesses run by minoritised groups.

On our supply chain goal, we were starting from a point of limited knowledge: we set this goal and target in 2021 without access to any baseline data, and until very recently, we still did not know much about the companies and organisations we contract with. Through a survey of 115 companies, we collected information about the demographic makeup of the CEOs and founders who run the businesses that we contract with, as well as the social purpose and/or socially responsible business practices of these suppliers. 26% of survey respondent CEOs were women, and 9% were from minoritised ethnic backgrounds. Removing double counting of minoritised ethnic women, we found that 28% of the suppliers we contracted with were led by someone from a minoritised background.

While stretching, we believe our 50% target is attainable, and we will be giving this goal due focus over the next year, refining our procurement processes to ensure minoritised business leaders have the best possible chance of being selected.

What’s next?

Our primary focus will be on reviewing and updating our procurement processes, developing preferred supplier frameworks for commonly procured goods and services that have a high representation of businesses led by people of minoritised backgrounds and supporting staff to adopt any changes we make to the procurement process through training and guidance. We will also be establishing a measurement approach, so that we can track our progress and assess if we need to adopt further interventions to achieve our goal. Once these critical foundations are in place, in the future, we may consider the feasibility and impact of introducing additional guidance around sustainable procurement.