Nesta exists to be useful – to bring together money, people and know-how to drive forward innovations that benefit the public. Since our foundation 16 years ago, we've had a real impact on the world around us and we're still helping to change the world for the better.
The following list isn't exhaustive, but illustrates the reach of our ambition and how we put our ideas into practice.
1. People Powered Health
The world is seeing a dramatic shift in how healthcare is organised, with a greater emphasis on prevention, patient self-management and mutual support for long-term conditions. But everywhere systems are struggling to push changes through, locked in a 20th century healthcare model founded primarily on hospitals, cure and purely clinical solutions. Nesta has piloted different models of what we call People Powered Health showing how these work in practice (with different methods of consultations, prescriptions and treatment) and influencing policy in the UK NHS and far beyond. We've also supported ways of mobilising volunteers; use of digital technology; and radical ways of orchestrating health knowledge to help people take control of their own health.
2. Digital making in education
We're helping a generation of young people not just to use digital technologies but to become digital makers – creating apps, websites, games and robots. The Make Things Do Stuff platform provides the tools; we back clubs of many kinds like Code Club and Coderdojo, that are reaching an ever-growing proportion of schools; and we've influenced policy to get computer science into the curriculum, opening up opportunities for millions of young people.
3. Putting the public back into public services
There's strong evidence that schools, hospitals, and even prisons work better if they can combine paid professional expertise with motivated volunteers. Through the £14 million Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund (a joint initiative with the Cabinet Office) we've been finding and growing the most successful ways of doing this, pointing to a future where public services are organised as a partnership between the professionals and the public. We've also pushed a wave of new innovations in giving, many using technologies to encourage people to give more time or money, or to share resources. Nearly ten million people have been reached by the innovations we've backed.
4. Growing investment with impact
We've pioneered the growing field of social investment - combining investment methods with social goals. We already had a strong venture team, and a portfolio of outstanding technology companies. Additionally we backed new intermediaries; supported research on the new models of investment; and now run a £20 million impact investment fund demonstrating how investments can be made that link closely to evidence of impact.
5. Making evidence useful
Innovation is about new ideas – but it's also about finding out whether these really are better than what exists. We've worked to improve how evidence is used and made useful by bringing together 2,000 people and organisations into the Alliance for Useful Evidence to help public services and charities become much better at using the available evidence, and to help researchers make their research useful and useable. We also helped persuade the government to back a network of 'what works' centres to embed evidence into the work of public services. Six are now up and running.
6. Growing digital innovation for the common good
Billions of pounds have been spent promoting digital innovation for commercial and military purposes, but a lot less on reaping the public benefit of these technologies. Much of our work involves finding creative new ways of using digital technologies to achieve a public benefit. In the arts we run a digital Research & Development fund that's supported creative ideas in galleries, museums, music and theatre. We've backed dozens of apps and web tools for use in civil society (for example in the sharing economy or crowdfunding) and by the public sector. We're also working on new tools for parliaments and assemblies to involve their citizens in shaping and making decisions, with collaborators across Europe, in Finland, Iceland and Spain.
7. Mapping the new economy
We've pioneered new ways of understanding the dynamics of economic growth with our Innovation Index showing how to measure intangible investment by business – in design, R&D and software. We've shown why this is so important to growth, and its principles have been taken up by the OECD and others. Our measures of the creative economy show that in the UK some 2.5 million jobs are creative, or around a tenth of the economy. These tools have been adopted by the UK government and look set to be taken up around the world - providing a new lens on how wealth is created and helping policymakers to support growth in creative jobs. And some of our most recent work uses cutting-edge data methods to map newer sectors – like the games industry and software, or the world of digital startups. Meanwhile in Malaysia we've been developing new ways of mapping commercial investment in innovation which we hope will become global standards.
8. Innovation skills
We want to make it easier for people to innovate successfully. There's no shortage of books, anecdotes and inspiring talks available, but surprisingly little providing practical guidance on how to generate ideas, test them and then take them to scale. We're trying to demystify innovation – and offer lots of tools and skills via our website, through online and printed guides. Our DIY Toolkit has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and translated into Chinese and Arabic, and our field guides to topics like prizes and incubation have been used all over the world.
9. Pioneering new methods for innovation
We develop new ways of bringing ideas to life – from accelerators to public labs. One of the methods we've promoted is the Challenge Prize; setting a measurable target and offering a financial reward for inventors who can achieve it. Our Centre for Challenge Prizes has run prizes in everything from energy to waste, data to education. In 2014 we revived the 300-year old Longitude Prize and involved the public in choosing which of six big global challenges deserved to be the focus for a new £10 million prize fund. In the end Anti-Microbial Resistance was chosen as the priority, and the UK fund has now been matched by a parallel fund launched by President Obama.
10. Shape the future
Everything we do is designed to help people shape the future more effectively, to understand the possibilities and threats, and to use judgement about which innovations will be most useful and which ones won't. Through events like our flagship festival FutureFest, we bring people into contact with new possibilities – from synthetic biology and food to the shared economy.
Nesta now works all over the world promoting effective innovation for the common good. We have outstanding teams working in investment, research, grant-making and practical programmes.
For more on our work please sign up for our newsletter, download our digital magazine The Long + Short, and check out our website: www.nesta.org.uk
Nesta
1 Plough Place
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@nesta_uk
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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 SCO42833. Registered office: 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE.
