It’s now 25 years since the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts came into being. The idea was to use £250 million of National Lottery funding to create the UK’s first-ever national endowment, capitalising on the UK’s globally recognised talent for invention by creating an organisation that would support, encourage and inspire innovation.
For the first two decades, Nesta – as the new organisation quickly became known – focused on investing in talented innovators and enhancing the UK’s capacity and ability to innovate. Pioneering work on education led to the creation of FutureLab, a global leader in developing digital curriculum materials, that today (as part of the National Foundation for Educational Research) supports schools to experiment and innovate. Later, Nesta helped build the field of social innovation by outlining methods and providing practical support on how to innovate, developing institutions like Future Gov and the What Works Centres, many of which continue to play critical roles in innovation today.
Today, Nesta’s aim is to design, test and scale new solutions to society’s biggest problems. For the last 3 years, we’ve been a mission-driven organisation, focused on tackling three of the UK’s biggest challenges: climate change, child inequality and obesity.
We see our role as threefold. First, we work as an innovation partner, designing and testing solutions with retailers, energy companies and other organisations on the frontline. Second, we act as a venture builder, building and investing in innovative start-ups. Third, we operate as a system shaper, influencing the policies and institutions that shape innovation in our missions which are likely to maximise impact.
As an innovation partner, we work with a wide range of people and organisations. We are working with Asda to develop a health strategy and identify interventions that can improve health. We worked with the Centre for Net Zero on an innovative trial to measure whether remotely controlling heat pump energy use could save energy without negative consequences for consumers. We’re exploring how generative AI can support children’s reading, working with the story creation app Tandem. Our Fairer Start Local programme with York, Stockport and Leeds Councils saw us developing new products that integrated data to better target support. We’ve also launched many other programmes, from our Greener Homes Content Catalyst working with major broadcasters to our collaboration with Art Fund on family support through museums.
As a venture builder, we’ve built seven ventures since orienting ourselves around missions three years ago. These include Carno, a digital platform that makes it easier for consumers to transition their homes to clean heat and Ogma, a speech and language therapy assistant that uses AI to reach many more children at a lower cost. Through Nesta Impact Investments, we’ve invested £9 million in early-stage companies like Aira, a heat pump installation service.
Our system shaper role came to the fore over the past year. With the UK general election poised to mark a pivotal moment in British politics, we worked with more than 300 experts to highlight the big policy choices facing an incoming Government. We helped shape the direction of Great British Energy, and published ‘Delivering Clean Heat’ – the most comprehensive roadmap to date for the decarbonisation of the UK’s housing stock. We also analysed over a million food purchases to develop a unique and usable way of scoring Britain’s biggest grocery retailers’ sales for healthiness – data work that enabled us to craft a policy recommendation for mandatory health targets for major retailers, which if implemented could reduce obesity in the UK by 23%.
Our three roles are most powerful when they work together, harnessing synergies and creating impact. So our policy work on mandatory health targets is informed by our experiences of working in partnership with Asda. Our investment in Carno to reduce the cost of getting a heat pump works in parallel with our work with the Centre for Net Zero to shift energy consumption away from peak times, and both informed the ‘Delivering Clean Heat’ policy plan.
Our mission-driven work is made stronger by working with two entities owned by Nesta: our global consultancy, BIT (which combines behavioural science expertise with robust evaluation and data), and Challenge Works (which designs and delivers challenge prizes that incentivise cutting-edge innovation). Together, we form the Nesta Group – a powerhouse of applied research and innovation that operates globally to design, test and scale solutions to social challenges.
This year, BIT has worked on a dizzying variety of projects around the world, from minimising light pollution in France and improving hygiene behaviours in refugee settlements in Myanmar to promoting civil behaviour in video gaming. Alongside this eclectic range of investigations into human behaviour, BIT has also been focused on systems-level projects: continuing its partnership with Meta to develop deliberative forums for users to engage on the most important issues facing online communities, running the UK trial of Grassroots, an American anti-bullying programme built on peer influence, and partnering with Nigerian anti-corruption organisations to strengthen their capacity to apply behavioural science to their work.
Challenge Works designs and delivers challenge prizes that incentivise cutting-edge innovation to solve the world's most complex problems. Since its inception, it has distributed £210 million in prizes. Highlights from this year include the Longitude Prize on Dementia – a £3.42 million prize for breakthrough technology that learns from a person living with dementia to enable longer periods of independent living – and the Manchester Prize, which challenges innovators to use AI to tackle UK energy, environment and infrastructure issues.
Proud as we are of our past, as an innovation agency we are, by our very nature, more focused on the future and the possibilities that lie ahead. In the year to come, in each of our missions, we’ll continue to combine practical action through our experiments, prizes and venture building, with our work to shape policies and institutions. Through BIT, we’ll be harnessing behavioural science to do everything from tackling urban child obesity to overcoming barriers to malaria prevention, as well as collaborating with Bloomberg Philanthropies on the City Ideas Exchange.
But, throughout all this variety, we’ll remain focused on the vision that drives us forward: improving the lives of millions of people by 2030.
