In 2021, we launched an ambitious, mission-driven strategy to 2030. We set out to address some of society’s biggest challenges through three missions that aim to give children a fairer start by age five, to halve obesity in the UK, and to drastically reduce home carbon emissions.
This was a substantial shift for Nesta. We moved from being an enabler and promoter of innovation to being an active agent of change, seeking to identify innovative solutions and take them to scale through broad coalitions. By doing this, we sought to demonstrate in practice the potential of innovation to drive positive impact at real scale.
Several years into this strategy, we’re increasingly confident in our approach. While there is a long way to go and much that is beyond our control, we are seeing real promise across all three missions. Therefore, this update on our strategy is an evolution, not a wholesale change. The core ambition and approach we set out in 2021 remains the same. However, by learning from our successes and failures over the past few years and acknowledging the ways the world has changed, we’ve identified three priorities moving forward.
Our strategy to 2030
A summary of our 2025 update to our strategy
First, we will put even more into our missions. We’ve seen the power of our mission-driven approach: it’s helped us maintain focus, stay the course and rally together diverse skills around complex problems. Three years in, we still believe we have a line of sight to achieving all three missions, and consider none of them either intractable or likely to be solved without further intervention. We’ve also seen a mission-driven approach taken up by the new UK government, presenting new opportunities for collaboration. We therefore will not change our mission-driven approach or our choice of missions at this stage, and will put even more weight behind them.
Our 2030 strategy also identifies three main roles for Nesta to play: as an innovation partner, a venture builder and a system shaper. Our capabilities in applied research have helped us build practical innovation partnerships with Asda, the Centre for Net Zero (part of the Octopus Energy Group), and a selection of local authorities to drive positive change. Through our venture builder role, we’ve seen how new entrants to a system can drive change themselves as they scale and stimulate change by others - whether that’s Aira’s new heat pump installation business model or Carno, which we incubated to digitise the heat pump installation journey. And our innovation partnerships and ventures have generated insights, credibility and proof points that support our efforts as a system shaper, seeking to bring about wider changes in policy and practice. Since 2021, we have identified potential policy changes that could have a positive impact on all three of our missions, with this area of work becoming a critical path for the scale of impact we want to see.
That’s why our second priority is to deepen our policy work. Over the past 18 months, we’ve already begun to strengthen our policy capacity. We will continue work across Nesta and BIT (which Nesta has now fully acquired, forming a combined powerhouse of applied innovation), using the strength of both organisations to develop and promote ideas that are critical to achieving our missions.
Third, we will tool up for scaling. Our organisational purpose is to design, test and scale new solutions to society’s biggest problems. Perhaps inevitably, in the early years of our strategy to 2030, we have leaned more into designing and testing solutions. However, we now believe we have the seeds of ideas that can transform society: whether that’s retailer targets, collective energy switching, or integrated family support systems. To get to impact at scale will require a lot: policy change, coalitions of other actors and supportive public attitudes. Technology will inevitably play a huge role, and we’ll be looking at how AI and new technologies can further each of our missions. Scaling is not just about rolling out solutions - it is an innovation challenge in its own right. We will need to address that challenge head-on as we accelerate towards our ambitious 2030 missions in the next phase of our strategy.
We’ve come a long way in a few short years since 2021. We’re grateful for that work and proud of the progress we’ve made. However, the hardest part - driving impact at real scale - remains ahead of us. It’s never been more important that, as a society, we collectively make progress on these issues and do whatever it takes to get there.
We cannot do this alone, and we invite others who share our vision to join with us to create meaningful, lasting change.
Ravi Gurumurthy, Group Chief Executive Officer
