In 2021, Nesta set out on a new strategy focused on achieving three missions; a healthy life, a fairer start and a sustainable future. Each has a moonshot goal – halving obesity, eliminating the outcome gap between children growing up in disadvantage and the national average; and decarbonising homes.
Our approach has focused on playing three roles. First, as an innovation partner, we’ve been designing and testing solutions with retailers, energy companies and other frontline organisations. So instead of embarking on policy frameworks and worrying about implementation, we’ve been starting with the practitioners. Second, as a venture builder, we have been building new ventures from scratch by generating new ideas for products and business models, recruiting founders and supporting their growth, as well as investing in early stage companies. Third, as a system shaper, we’ve been influencing the policies and institutional environments that guide innovation in these areas.
Our first major success has been an intriguing one. Innovation is often associated with novel technologies, but small tweaks in human behaviour when done at scale can have dramatic effects. The Money Saving Boiler Challenge saw an estimated 3 million households turn down their boiler temperature, reducing carbon emissions by around 500,000 tonnes and saving households nearly £300M (as well as a further £157m for taxpayers by reducing spending on the Energy Price Guarantee). The lessons from the Challenge are clear: scour the field for ideas and identify ‘positive deviants’; test them in real-world settings to build evidence; make the consumer journey as simple and easy as possible and build a big coalition of partners to drive change, from consumer organisations and government to energy companies.
Our venture-building work has rapidly grown this year. Nesta Impacts Investments awarded over £4 million of financing to five new mission-aligned enterprises, and Mission Studio (a partnership between Nesta and Founders Factory) deployed around £1 million to spin out a number of new tech start-ups, including heat pump installation software company Carno and Freebird Club, a social travel and homestay community for over 50s.
This year we have placed particular emphasis on our system-shaper role, translating our emerging research and insights into policy as a key route to achieving impact. Bringing together expertise from Nesta and Behavioural Insight Team (BIT), we established a Rapid Insights Team to provide timely, evidence-based advice to UK policymakers. We created the experimental Minister for the Future, an initiative that brought together world-leading academics, scientists, campaigners and business leaders to pitch new ideas for how to tackle big social challenges, looking beyond election cycles to the long term. Taking our own advice, we established the UK 2040 Options project to bring fresh angles and insights to the defining long-term policy choices and challenges facing the UK.
This review also reflects the work of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), acquired by Nesta in 2021. During this second year of partnership, more and more work across the two organisations has drawn on our shared networks, skills and capabilities. Current joint activity includes the SALIENT Food Trials, a consortium designing and evaluating interventions to promote healthy eating and improve food’s environmental impact. We are also working together to explore how to reformulate food products, redesign supermarket promotions and improve the choice architecture of online takeaway platforms. Our organisations are also collaborating with the Development Bank of Wales to understand consumer attitudes towards home eco-upgrades and the financial products and services that could incentivise them.
The global span of the BIT’s work was one of the key benefits of the bringing together of our two organisations and this year has seen further examples of their international success. Highlights across the team include BIT’s work with UNICEF, delivering large trials in seven countries on increasing the uptake of COVID-19, HPV and MMR vaccinations, working with Stanford University to deliver deliberative democracy initiatives for Meta’s global user base and partnering with Unilever to run what is – to our knowledge – the largest ever online randomised-controlled trial on the effects of social media messaging, involving over 6,000 TikTok or Instagram users. BIT also worked on encouraging commuters to switch from cars to public transport in Australia, reducing consumers’ vulnerability to online fraud in France, and reducing hotel food waste in the UAE.
In the year ahead, we’ll look to accelerate our rate of progress, redoubling our efforts to achieve positive social change. Among many other things, we’ll be bringing our expertise and capabilities to exploring the impact of family income on child development, developing the first ever tool to compare the impact of different obesity interventions, working with global food businesses to design and test a series of trials across the food sector, trialling a universal free school meal month in Wales, encouraging householders to consider sustainable heating through the Visit A Heat Pump scheme, and spinning out further tech ventures through Mission Studio. BIT will continue to work closely with partners around the world to deliver applied behavioural science and research programmes to drive positive change. Highlights for the coming year include expanding operations in Latin America, with plans to open a new operation in Colombia next year.
We will stay focused on our vision of improving the lives of millions of people by 2030. We hope our commitment to achieving practical change will ensure that we continue to grow as a vital and innovative force in the public realm, making a lasting contribution to building a future where people and the planet can thrive.
