Our purpose: at Nesta, our purpose is to design, test and scale new solutions to society's biggest problems.

Our vision: by 2030, Nesta will have significantly improved the lives of millions of people. Combining rigour and creativity, we will be a world leader in driving innovation for social good.

Foreword

Ravi Gurumurthy, Group Chief Executive Officer

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.

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.

Our reasons for optimism

When we launched our three missions in 2021, we knew that progress on these complex, systematic challenges wouldn't be linear.

Obesity prevalence and disparities in early childhood development remain stubbornly persistent, and progress on home decarbonisation remains too slow to meet national targets.

Even so, we see reasons for optimism in three areas.

Policy environment

In recent years, we've seen encouraging shifts in public opinion and policy in our mission areas. Prevention in healthcare is now widely recognised as vital, with growing support for early interventions to reduce long-term costs and improve outcomes. In planning, political momentum is building to address long-standing barriers, unlocking sustainable development and infrastructure improvements critical to decarbonisation. These shifts suggest that transformative policy change may increasingly be within reach.

At the same time, the political environment has been turbulent, with four prime ministers since 2021. This churn has made consistent policymaking a challenge, but there are now signs of stability. The new UK government has placed missions at the heart of its agenda, signalling a longer-term commitment to innovation and experimentation. While its missions differ from Nesta's, there is clear overlap in focus areas, creating fresh opportunities for collaboration and impact.

Adoption of new technologies

Technological advances have potential to accelerate progress across our missions. The emergence of GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, offers a potentially viable - albeit costly - treatment route to halving obesity. Older technologies, such as smart meters, are scaling up, enabling innovative approaches to demand management and household decarbonisation.

More generally, we are climbing the S-curve of technological adoption, where rapid advancements and falling costs unlock transformative possibilities. For example, the declining costs of low-carbon technologies are making sustainable options more accessible, while generative AI could revolutionise early years education by enhancing parent-child interactions and improving the efficiency of practitioners. As these technologies mature, they open up new ways to tackle social challenges at scale.

Growing use of innovative methods

The way big social issues are addressed is evolving. Governments, local authorities and other organisations are increasingly adopting powerful techniques such as challenge prizes, collective intelligence, rapid evaluation methods and behavioural science. Applying new methods to entrenched challenges opens up more opportunities for impact.

At Nesta, we've brought together and refined a wide range of innovation methods through our teams at BIT, Challenge Works, and the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, applying them in partnership with others to tackle complex challenges. One example of how government is increasingly embracing these approaches is the Cabinet Office's Test, Learn and Grow programme, which is deploying multidisciplinary teams of designers, analysts, developers and behavioural scientists to take on public service reform challenges across the UK.

What we want to achieve

Our missions

To achieve our vision of significantly improving the lives of millions of people, we're doubling down on our three 2030 missions: to give every child the same chance of developing to their full potential, to halve obesity, and to cut household emissions by 30%. These missions address entrenched societal challenges and demand bold, innovative solutions.

Three years in, we remain confident that each of these issues is fundamentally tractable. We've already achieved significant milestones that validate that our approach and resources can make a difference. And, informed by several years of practical experiments and research, we have a clearer view of the path to 2030 one that recognises that although highly ambitious, each mission is achievable.

A fairer start

We want to break the link between family background and life chances. Our mission is that from 2030 every child has the same chance of developing to their full potential in the early years.

Children growing up in poverty can expect to die a decade earlier, spend more years in poor health and have fewer years of employment than their more affluent peers. This gap between richer and poorer opens at birth, widens during the early years and persists throughout life, becoming increasingly difficult and costly to close.

Achieving this mission is not only a moral imperative, but an economic one. The cost of lost opportunity in England alone is estimated at around £16 billion per year. With a strong evidence base to guide action, new technological possibilities, a will in the sector to better coordinate, and political momentum to prioritise the early years, we believe major change is possible.

How we've evolved since 2021

The first phase of our work on this mission focused on better defining and measuring the outcomes we are trying to improve. We used a wealth of administrative and longitudinal surveys to characterise the size and nature of socio-economic inequalities in different dimensions of early development. Notably, we produced the first ever descriptions of early childhood inequalities at the population level for Scotland and Wales. While recognising the importance of understanding child development in a holistic way, we decided our work would focus primarily on children's cognitive, language and socio-emotional development.

Next, we looked to improve our understanding of the barriers that prevent children from reaching their developmental milestones, and sought out interventions and changes to the system that could remove those barriers. Responsive caregiving and opportunities for early learning within and outside the home emerged as particularly important, with evidence showing that the most impactful ways to improve children's outcomes include quality early education and care, along with joined-up systems of support that deliver holistic services, including parenting support, to families.

• Our analysis of early-years government spend over the past 15 years revealed a need to rebalance policy priorities and spend towards support for children's home environments and quality of early education for children from poorer backgrounds.
• Through our design and testing work of parenting interventions, such as Tiny Happy People and our AI-powered venture Ogma, we reinforced our conviction that digital technologies have a big role to play in delivering cost-effective support for families, as a complement to in-person interactions.
• Through multi-year innovation partnerships with three local authorities, we built data products that exemplify the impact that better collection, integration and use of data nationally and locally can have on outcomes, by enabling better detection of need and targeting of support.
• Working closely with parenting intervention developers, and by mapping early-years practice across local authorities, we highlighted the deep fragmentation of the parenting support landscape and the need for greater funding, guidance, coordination and support for local implementation and evaluation.
• We co-produced a joint midwifery and home visiting model with Stockport Council, which has reinforced our conviction in the importance of joining up services around the family and helped us better understand some of the barriers to integration on the ground.

We have also updated the wording of our mission statement, ensuring the ambition level is maintained while making it more applicable across the different nations of the UK.

Our game plan to 2030

The prime minister recently set the ambitious goal of raising the proportion of children reaching a good level of development from 67.7% to 75% by 2028. While this target is a galvanising force for action that we should leverage, we must ensure that it is achieved within the context of improving the outcomes of all children, regardless of family background.

To see these changes happen by 2030, some big policy shifts must occur within this Parliament. We will continue to advocate for a strengthened policy framework and increased spending, with a focus on joining up services to support families with young children, creating enabling conditions for the scaling of effective parenting support, and leveraging the substantial investment in early education and childcare to drive quality provision for disadvantaged children in particular.

But these policy changes will not be enough without effective implementation. The next step for us will be to ramp up our strategic partnerships with intervention developers, delivery partners, and local and devolved governments to scale good practice where it already exists. Where it doesn't, we will test and learn our way to new solutions on the ground that have the potential to scale.

A healthy life

We want to increase healthy life expectancy while narrowing health inequalities. Our mission is to halve the prevalence of obesity in the UK by 2030.

If achieved, this could lead to an extra 400,000 years of healthy life lived by people across the UK and an estimated £98 billion in societal cost savings. This would put obesity levels in the UK back to where they were in the 1990s.

We believe this is achievable by focusing on changes to the food environment. Typically, the onus is put on the individual to change, with interventions focusing on giving better information or encouraging an increase in physical activity. Behavioural science shows that asking individuals to make large lifestyle changes is likely to be ineffective at the scale required. By contrast, lots of small changes to the food environment - many of which may be imperceptible to individuals can generate the big changes in diet that would be enough to halve obesity in the UK, without asking too much of individuals or removing the joy from food.

How we've evolved since 2021

Since launching the mission in 2021 we have researched the change in diets needed, used that research to develop policy proposals, and worked with private sector partners to test and refine our thinking.

Our foundational research combined gold-standard physiology modelling with nationally representative survey data to show that an 8.5% reduction in kcals - about 216 kcal per day for people living with excess weight - would be enough to halve obesity. Consumption often fluctuates by more than this each day without people noticing.

To understand what changes in diet would be needed to yield this calorie reduction, we brought together data about food purchases from supermarkets and convenience stores ('in home'), as well as restaurants and takeaways ('out of home'), to create the most accurate profile of sales and nutrition across these categories that has ever existed for the UK population. This allowed us to realistically model the needed changes in purchasing behaviour and diet.

We then identified what it would take to bring this change about.

• Our blueprint for halving obesity, drawing on more than 2,000 research papers and an advisory group of 16 academics and experts, gives policymakers the ability for the first time to directly compare the impact, strength of evidence and cost of over 30 policies on obesity and clearly see what is likely to work and what isn't.
• Our retailer targets proposal, a plan for legally binding and not unduly burdensome health targets for large retailers, on its own could reduce national obesity by 20%, without any cost to business.

Given the scale of change required, policy is a critical lever. We are currently supporting the UK government on its policy ambitions, most recently with our CEO co-chairing one of the government's 10-year health plan working groups.

At the same time, we have begun to work with private sector partners to prove the feasibility of our recommendations, and are pursuing more immediate changes to the food environment through our own projects. For example, we are partnering with Asda to pilot strategies for improving health across its national footprint of more than 1,000 stores. And we have spun out two new mission-driven start-ups, Martee's and Mealia, which aim to make it easier for small retailers to stock healthy food, and for families to plan healthier meals through their weekly supermarket delivery.

Finally, the rapid rise of GLP-1 medications has offered new hope for those struggling with weight loss. While these drugs can play a major role, they're not a long-term solution on their own. A healthier food environment can prevent weight regain and reduce reliance on medication. Together with medical breakthroughs, this has the potential to drive lasting change.

Our game plan to 2030

To halve obesity by 2030 we need to see changes in the food environment by 2029 as weight change is a slow process. That means key policy shifts must be in serious discussion by 2027. We believe this can be done in a way that benefits both public health and businesses, and over the next few years our focus is on proving that change is possible.

We've already synthesised the best available evidence in our Blueprint for Action - we broadly know what needs to happen. The next step is scaling up our partnerships with retailers, producers, restaurants and local and devolved governments to trial and test these changes in real-world settings. By piloting these interventions, we want to demonstrate that significant improvements in diet are possible without major downsides for industry or consumers. This evidence will help ensure that policy is designed in a way that delivers maximum health benefits with minimal disruption to business, while keeping food enjoyable and accessible.

By 2027, we want to have built an undeniable case for action, giving policymakers, industry leaders and the public the confidence that a healthier food system is not only necessary but achievable.

A sustainable future

We want to reduce carbon emissions from homes. Our mission is to reduce home carbon emissions in the UK by 30% by 2030.

Homes are directly responsible for around 13% of the UK's carbon emissions. Most of this comes from using fossil fuels - gas and oil - in home heating. We're focusing on finding ways to speed up adoption of clean alternatives, such as electric heat pumps.

Adoption of heat pumps and low-carbon heat networks is already much further forward in some other countries. Our research suggests that if switching to low-carbon heating was more affordable and more straightforward we could see much faster adoption in the UK. With a 30% reduction in emissions by 2030, the UK would be well on track to decarbonising homes and able to move to mass-market adoption in the 2030s. This could also have a wider impact on global emissions by showing other countries grappling with the same challenge that home decarbonisation can be delivered quickly and in a way that is politically and publicly acceptable.

How we've evolved since 2021

Since launching the mission in 2021 we have iterated on our theory of change, seen some promising early impact, and begun pushing towards impact at scale.

Our early analysis found that accelerating the switch to low-carbon heating will be the most influential factor in decarbonising homes at the pace required. We have actively contributed to a growing consensus among policymakers that electrification is the most cost-effective way to cut household emissions, and quickly identified affordability as a key barrier to uptake of low-carbon heating. Our detailed research and modelling exploring the drivers of heat pump costs highlighted the role of electricity pricing in making heat pumps less affordable than boilers. This has now become a key focus of our policy work.

Our first wave of interventions, putting theory into practice across different parts of the solution, have begun to have an impact.

• On affordability, our work with the Development Bank of Wales influenced its rollout of retrofit loans, while one of our new ventures, Carno, has shown it can reliably reduce the survey and design stage of a heat pump installation by up to three hours.
• On simplifying the consumer journey, we have developed consumer-facing tools such as Get A Heat Pump, which provides a single source of comprehensive and impartial advice. Furbnow, a spinout from our venture studio, has helped simplify hundreds of home retrofits since launch, while our investment in Aira supported its UK expansion, enabling it to help thousands of UK homes to install heat pumps
• On shifting attitudes, our Visit A Heat Pump service not only smooths the customer journey by helping consumers understand the realities of ownership, it also allows common myths to be addressed through peer-to-peer experience sharing. We are also working to get positive stories into mainstream media with reach into the millions, briefing broadcasters and production teams on home decarbonisation.
• On supporting installers, another spinout, Renbee, is onboarding hundreds of installers to its platform, cutting installer admin, while Start at home gives newly trained heat pump installers a heat pump to install at home, enabling them to become knowledgeable about and confident with the technology.
• On demand shifting, our HeatFlex trial with the Centre for Net Zero showed that demand can be shifted away from peak periods while maintaining home temperatures.

The next step is to build on this early promise and move increasingly towards impact at scale. We have already had some successes in driving towards impact at real scale.

• During the energy crisis of 2022, we launched a public-facing campaign, Money Saving Boiler Challenge, aiming to help households save money and reduce carbon emissions by running their boilers more efficiently. Our evaluation suggests that 3.1 million households turned down their boiler flow temperatures over the course of the campaign, saving an estimated 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and an estimated £300 million annually on household energy bills. The campaign also helped raise awareness and acceptance of lower-temperature heating, which paves the way for heat pumps.
• Our policy work has helped shape the agenda at UK level and in the devolved nations, and has contributed to changing specific policies. For example, we commissioned modelling on the cumulative noise of heat pumps, which found that even under worst-case scenario conditions there would be no noticeable impact on noise levels. This helped reassure the UK government that modifying permitted development rules for heat pumps in England would not lead to additional noise nuisance. Going forward, significantly fewer heat pumps should need planning permission, lifting a barrier to adoption.

Along the way we have learned a lot and adjusted accordingly. We've deepened our understanding of what it takes to decarbonise homes and where we can have the biggest impact. We have moved away from trying to improve the efficiency of existing fossil fuel heating systems, as switching to low-carbon alternatives is more important in the long term. And rather than focus on shifting energy demand away from peak times as a goal in itself, we are folding it into our work on affordability. Shifting demand is an important enabler of low-carbon heating, and when coupled with tariffs rewarding households for shifting demand can reduce running costs, but may not cut household carbon emissions directly.

The external landscape has also changed. Substantive government investment in heat pump subsidies has lowered financial barriers for households, while rapid advancements in AI and digital solutions have created new opportunities for personalised, scalable interventions. As a result, we've refined our approach, doubling down on scaling heat pump adoption while stepping back from areas with more limited impact.

Our game plan to 2030

Our best chance of achieving the 2030 mission is through helping develop and scale up initiatives, policies and services that rapidly increase uptake of low-carbon heating.

Specifically, we want to make it more attractive, easier and more affordable for homes to switch to heat pumps and other low-carbon technologies, ensure the policy environment supports and incentivises this shift, and help grow the range of solutions and supply chain to deliver them.

Heat pumps currently make up around 3% of new heating installations each year. By 2030, heat pumps and other low-carbon solutions need to form 50% of all new installations to meet climate goals. Making a shift of this magnitude requires ambitious policies, as well as a rapid shift in public attitudes and the attractiveness of heat pumps and other low-carbon heating solutions as a consumer proposition.

Through our practical innovation work with partners, and our ventures and investment activity, we aim to show how heat pumps and other low-carbon solutions can become affordable and appealing to households whatever their circumstances - for example, by testing how innovative tariffs can reduce heat pump running costs, or finding ways to support homes across entire neighbourhoods to switch to low-carbon heating together. We will continue to work with installers and industry more widely to design and test ways to grow a skilled workforce and support those already in the industry to make the shift to low-carbon heating.

We will use insights from our innovation work to shape policy advice to governments in the UK and devolved nations and work actively alongside officials and politicians to support policy development. We will grow our public-facing work, based on a more detailed understanding of what might motivate different consumer groups to adopt low-carbon heating - through doing this we hope to directly support uptake and create an environment in which politicians feel confident to act.

Areas of exploration

In Nesta's 2021 strategy, we identified several areas of exploration: secondary education, loneliness and productivity.

Exploring these areas in a lower-intensity way allowed us to test their impact potential, with the option to commit more resources to them over time. However, at this stage of our strategy we are more sure than ever of the impact potential of our core work in early years, obesity and home emissions, and want to maximise the resources and focus we give to those priorities. We have therefore decided to stop work on our areas of exploration.

• A fairer start: we explored interventions in secondary education to assess where our efforts could most effectively promote equitable outcomes. This exploration reinforced that early childhood is the critical period that shapes a child's future, influencing everything from health to earnings to life expectancy, and where we can make the most difference. Going forward we will focus our resources on early interventions, aiming to set children up for success long before they reach school-leaving age.
• A healthy life: loneliness is an important social issue that is strongly correlated with long-term physical health outcomes. However, after exploring the evidence with academic partners we no longer see a timely path to establishing a direct causal link with a level of confidence that would justify putting our resources into tackling loneliness. Instead, we will focus on tackling obesity - where the science is clear, and the potential for change is huge.
• A sustainable future: we explored the links between productivity and sustainability, including the potential of 'green jobs' to drive growth while simultaneously addressing environmental concerns, building on Nesta's previous work in these areas. Over time, it became increasingly clear that to maximise our impact we needed to focus on interventions that have a direct effect on reducing carbon emissions, leading us to refine our approach accordingly.

How we'll achieve our strategy

We will continue to work across all stages of the innovation lifecycle: designing new solutions, testing their effectiveness, and driving for impact at scale. Each phase presents unique challenges to overcome.

At the design stage, a lack of time, resources and capacity often prevents practitioners from systematically developing or prototyping new solutions. Meanwhile, risk aversion and insufficient support can deter the development of radical ideas. We've addressed this - for example, by partnering with large retailers to develop ambitious healthy food targets, and by supporting early-stage entrepreneurs to bring new ideas to market.

In the test phase, a lack of rigorous evaluation can make it hard for the most promising solutions to be identified and adopted. Voluntary and private organisations may lack access to experimental methods, while small-scale academic studies rarely lead to field trials large enough to drive wider adoption. Robust testing at the right stage and scale can act as a proof point, cutting through inertia and laying the foundation for large-scale change.

The scaling phase is an innovation challenge in its own right. Scaling solutions to entrenched social challenges requires an ability to navigate complex systems, drawing on strong partnerships and motivated coalitions. In most cases, governmental programmes and supportive regulation are a necessary but not sufficient condition of lasting, large-scale change; only with a supportive public can they fully take hold. Several years into our strategy, we have designed and tested solutions with enormous potential, and are increasingly taking on this scaling challenge.

Our roles

To overcome these barriers, Nesta will play three complementary roles: working as an innovation partner, a venture builder and a system shaper. We defined these roles in 2021 and have updated them based on learnings from the last few years.

Innovation partner

As an innovation partner, Nesta works with partners in the public, private and voluntary sectors to design, test and scale new solutions. These could be interventions, products or services.

We begin by seeking to understand the problems we're trying to tackle. We work closely with people directly affected by those problems and frontline practitioners to ensure we understand the problems and what drives them. Through collaboration with delivery partners, we generate ideas and co-create solutions, leveraging our interdisciplinary teams of designers, behavioural scientists, data scientists and researchers. And by drawing on the best available evidence, we identify proven approaches that could be adopted at scale. Our partners' professional expertise, access to people and data, and deep knowledge of the system, ensure that solutions are well-grounded in the realities of delivery.

We test ideas and solutions with stage-appropriate rigour, dropping those with insufficient potential for impact at scale and refining the most promising. We design for scale from the start by bringing in potential scaling partners early, addressing each actor's constraints and incentives, developing models that are easy to replicate across relevant contexts, and intentionally generating proof-points that help make the case for larger-scale changes in policy and practice.

To date we have partnered with companies, local authorities, universities and sector leaders, including the Food Foundation and Green Finance Institute, to tackle challenges across all three missions. For example, we have worked with the Art Fund to pilot Mini Wonders, a fun and engaging programme promoting positive interactions between parents/caregivers and their children aged 2-4 years old; with sector-leading energy providers such as Octopus Energy and Eon Next to launch the Money Saving Boiler Challenge; and with Starbucks to identify factors influencing healthy food access and consumption in the out of home sector.

Making supermarket aisles healthier with Asda

We are partnering with Asda to test ways of shifting shopping habits across the business, with the goal of making healthier choices easier for Asda's 18 million weekly customers. Through iterative live trials, we are refining approaches that balance business incentives with public health outcomes, using a unique holistic, sales-weighted health scoring system. By demonstrating the commercial viability of healthier retail strategies, we are helping to build the case for industry-wide adoption, with the potential to significantly improve national dietary habits.

Venture builder

Sometimes innovation requires a more radical departure from existing practice than is likely to be possible within large institutions. New and early-stage ventures have significant freedom to innovate, often drawing on cutting-edge technological developments. The commercial market then acts as a fitness mechanism, forcing ventures to iterate towards products and services for which there is significant demand. A combination of capital injections, reinvestment of revenue in growth, and an existential incentive to get the innovation in the hands of users can then generate an accelerated path to scale.

As a venture builder, Nesta seeks to create new ventures from scratch and help existing early-stage ventures to succeed, in service of our missions. Mission Studio works hand-in-hand with entrepreneurs to design and launch scalable tech start-ups with potential to make a meaningful dent in one or more of our missions, drawing on Nesta's capabilities, knowledge and networks. Nesta Impact Investments supports established early-stage ventures to achieve their impact objectives and potentially shift key markets.

Since 2021, we have spun out nine new start-ups and invested in 16 early-stage companies to directly further our missions and create enabling market conditions for them to succeed. Our spinouts include Furbnow, who are enabling energy-efficient home retrofits across the UK, Martee AI, whose pilot has shown that through better demand forecasting they can help SMEs stock healthier food with a shorter shelf life and save them money, and Mealia, who are helping families seamlessly plan healthy meals and get the ingredients delivered to their door. Our investments include Aira, who are supporting thousands of homes to install heat pumps, and Mixergy.

Making home heating more efficient with Mixergy

Mixergy is tackling household energy inefficiency through its smart hot water tanks that optimise energy consumption. By enabling precise control and learning user behaviour, these tanks reduce unnecessary energy use, lowering costs to homeowners and reducing carbon emissions. Nesta's support has helped Mixergy scale its operations, with thousands of units sold and a growing consumer base. As Mixergy scales it will take more and more carbon out of the UK's homes.

System shaper

Innovations can thrive or die because of how the system around them functions. Politics, regulation and economic incentives all influence whether promising approaches gain traction, while public attitudes can drive the adoption of promising technologies, such as heat pumps, or inhibit them. Influencing systems is challenging but often necessary to achieve change at sufficient scale.

As a system shaper, Nesta seeks to understand relevant systems for each mission and identify key points of leverage within them. We seek to shape policy, regulation and incentives, primarily through direct engagement with policymakers and other decision-makers. We bring new ideas and perspectives to tired debates and advocate for evidence-based solutions. Our proposals are firmly rooted in our experimental research and work on the ground as an innovation partner and venture builder. This differentiates our proposals, ensuring that theory ultimately works in practice, while Nesta's unique cross-sector position and convening power ensure proposals are informed by and relevant to different parts of the system.

We also aim to shift social norms and attitudes, in order to change behaviours directly and build a supportive environment for political or regulatory change. We do this, for example, by supporting mission-critical campaigns, convening and mobilising other actors, and using creative ways to tell stories that reach large audiences, including through the transformative power of the arts.

To date, we have: shaped clean heat policy through detailed modelling that has informed the UK government's approach; informed media narratives on sustainability through the Greener Homes Catalyst Fund, worked with broadcasters to bring stories of low-carbon living to millions of homes through mainstream TV; and supported ShareAction's work with institutional investors to advocate for healthier practices within large corporations that shape our food system.

Charting a path to halving obesity: Nesta's Blueprint for halving obesity is a landmark piece of analysis that identifies the most effective policy interventions for tackling the UK's obesity crisis while minimising cost to the taxpayer. By modelling different policy scenarios, we have pinpointed the combination of regulatory, fiscal and behavioural interventions that could drive the greatest impact. This evidence-based framework is being used to engage policymakers by advocating for systemic changes that prioritise prevention and treatment. The blueprint exemplifies how Nesta's system-shaping work translates rigorous research into actionable policy plans, with the potential to improve health outcomes at a national scale.

What we'll need to be successful

Nesta's success continues to depend on five enablers: people and culture, innovation expertise, risk-tolerant capital, convening power, and focus and flexibility.

People and culture

The primary determinant of our success remains the quality and diversity of the people we attract, retain and recruit, and the culture in which we work. We seek to attract talented people to form high-performing teams, offering them the chance to work on some of society's most pressing challenges in an ambitious, fast-paced environment that is deeply focused on real-world change.

A guiding principle of our culture is that we do whatever it takes to achieve our missions. This means setting ambitious goals, thinking big and refusing to settle for small wins. We prioritise impact, constantly challenging ourselves and each other to go further and faster. We value progress over process, experimenting iteratively and adapting quickly based on what we learn. We believe in the power of collaboration and bring our best to the table, supporting each other to succeed. The culture is dynamic, with the freedom to experiment, the support to grow, and a shared drive to push boundaries. Learning is constant, and bold ideas are always welcome.

Innovation expertise

Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) are at the heart of our operations. We work diligently to close pay gaps, increase staff diversity, foster an inclusive culture, and promote inclusion both internally and externally. Since 2021 we've been delivering on our comprehensive EDI strategy, and have made important progress against its specific, measurable targets.

Tackling our missions requires us to draw on a range of innovation methods. We've strengthened our toolkit since 2021, adding skills such as software engineering and policy to our existing capabilities in data science, design, behavioural science, arts and experimental research, building Nesta and BIT into a combined powerhouse of applied innovation. And we're increasingly making use of new technologies, such as generative AI, across our innovation methods.

We remain committed to applying these and other lenses to our mission work in an outcome-driven way. We take a problem-first lens, asking ourselves: "what is needed to get to the most impactful answer, as quickly as possible?” Often the answer has been, and will be, a multidisciplinary team drawing on several approaches. Our work will continue to be enriched by the varied expertise and perspectives of academics, practitioners and those with lived experience of the issues we seek to address.

Risk-tolerant capital

We will continue to use our risk-tolerant capital strategically to take risks, make big bets and scale what works. This will include investing our capital in new and early-stage ventures that contribute to achieving our missions. As we move into the next phase of our strategy, increasingly looking to take solutions to scale, deploying our risk-tolerant capital effectively to maximise our impact will be essential.

We remain committed to delivering value for money in our spending, and to drawing down on our endowment in a way that safeguards its availability for future generations.

Convening power

We pride ourselves in our ability to bring together diverse groups of people from multiple sectors, from policymakers, investors and industry leaders to academics, charities and frontline practitioners. By doing this, we ensure that critical conversations and collaborations take place that would not happen otherwise, leading to actionable solutions that drive us towards our missions.

Convening powerful coalitions requires Nesta to demonstrate credibility, maintain a strong external reputation and cultivate sustained, trusted relationships. Leveraging our independence, resources and reputation, we will continue to form unique cross-sector coalitions in support of our missions.

Focus and flexibility

Focusing allows us to bring the best of Nesta to bear on each mission, rally resources and attention around shared goals, and fully commit to plans that we believe offer the best chance of achieving impact at scale. This inevitably means stepping away from work that may well be impactful, but that we have judged to be less impactful than our priorities. For this reason we have chosen to no longer work on productivity, loneliness and secondary education.

Remaining flexible, adaptive and responsive is also important. First, our theories of change for each mission must evolve as the world changes around us and we learn more, or they will become outdated and ineffective. Second, by remaining forward- and outward-looking we can unearth new approaches with the potential to magnify our impact over time. Our Mission Discovery Hub plays a vital role in this, scanning for trends and technologies that could accelerate our progress. Third, some of our work requires us to be responsive to the political landscape and able to engage in broader debates in order to be credible and have a seat at the table. Finally, while we believe in focus, outsized opportunities for impact can sometimes emerge opportunistically. Retaining some ability to react - particularly via our profit-making subsidiaries that require a broader thematic lens to thrive - can be beneficial.

Maintaining this delicate balance between focus and flexibility on an ongoing basis is an important enabler of our strategy.

Join us

Nesta's vision is that, by 2030, we will have significantly improved the lives of millions of people. This is ambitious, but we are confident that large-scale change is possible.

Should we succeed, it will be by standing on the shoulders of trailblazers, allies and critical friends who have encouraged, informed and challenged Nesta's work since our launch in 1998 with a public endowment from the National Lottery. We draw inspiration and support from the shared purpose and spirit of possibility, collaboration and generosity that we find every day across the social impact sector.

We cannot do this alone. We seek the engagement of multiple partners, and in return commit to working openly, sharing our successes and failures, and challenging ourselves to do whatever it takes to achieve our missions.

While the world we operate in will doubtless continue to change rapidly and we will need to change with it, our guiding vision will remain constant. Whether you are a frontline practitioner, policymaker, private company or innovator, we are looking for partners, friends and collaborators to develop ideas, test them rigorously and scale what works.

We hope you share our vision and will join us as we seek to improve the lives of millions of people through innovation.

Contact Us

58 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DS +44 (0)20 7438 2500 [email protected] X @nesta_uk f nesta.uk www.nesta.org.uk

Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales with company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091. Registered as a charity in Scotland number SC042833. Registered office: 58 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DS.