At Nesta, we’re an innovation agency for social good. What that’s meant for what we do has changed over the years since we were founded in 1998. We’ve gone from investing in talented innovators, to improving the UK’s capacity to innovate, and then more recently playing a key role in building the field of social innovation in the UK. 

In 2021, we adapted our strategy again and launched our mission-driven strategy to 2030. By then, more and more people had recognised the value of social innovation, and we’d seen a growth in the presence of innovators across the social and public sectors. But we believed that there weren’t enough proof points of social innovation that translated to impact at significant scale. And society’s challenges were getting increasingly complex: from the climate crisis to ingrained health and income inequalities. To tackle them demanded greater impact that made a positive difference to the lives of millions of people. 

As we set out in 2021, our strategy aimed to put all the innovation skills and tools we’d developed over the years into practice to drive progress on three ambitious missions: a fairer start, a healthy life, and a sustainable future. We also defined the three roles Nesta would play: as an innovation partner, a venture builder and a system shaper. 

We weren’t the first to take a mission-driven strategy - the likes of Mariana Mazzucato blazed a trail here - and it has become increasingly in vogue since we launched our strategy in 2021. More people are looking to ‘missions’ as a route to tackle society’s complex problems, and Labour’s election in 2024 gave them an even greater spotlight after the party centred their campaign on five flagship missions. 

However, being ‘mission-driven’ still means different things to different people: it draws on a diverse set of theory and practice (from industrial policy to deliverology to agile, test-and-learn methods). And it takes different forms in different contexts: mission-driven strategy won’t be the same in central government as it is in charities like Nesta given the different assets, resources, levers and roles they have. 

It’s now been four years since we launched our mission-driven strategy, and as planned we’ve just reviewed and updated it. In the spirit of working in the open, we wanted to share some of our key lessons about what we’ve learned over that period.

1. If you’re doing missions, you need to go all in

When we first launched our strategy in 2021, alongside our ‘major’ missions like halving obesity or reducing household emissions, we also established ‘areas of exploration’ linked to each mission theme. For our healthy life mission, for example, this was to explore the link between loneliness and health outcomes. We thought these ‘areas of exploration’ could act as hedges against our ‘major’ missions: if those majors didn’t work out (for example, if we couldn’t uncover a path to meaningfully reducing prevalence of obesity), we would have the flexibility to shift to a new challenge without a standing start. 

In reality, it was hard to make meaningful progress on our areas of exploration by engaging with them on the fringes. And they made it harder for us to commit to our major missions: if there’s always a new challenge glinting out of the corner of your eye, it’s tempting to switch focus when the going gets tough on our major missions. 

As part of our update to our strategy, we’ve dropped these areas of exploration and sought to put even more of our weight behind our missions – both in terms of absolute resource – and culturally by embracing a ‘whatever it takes’ attitude to achieving them. We recognise more than ever that you can’t embrace missions half-heartedly as an organisation – it requires deep shifts at every level.

2. All missions are different: you need to be specific about your plan to achieve them

Our missions are hugely ambitious, and the chance of reaching them by 2030 is improbable – but not impossible. To give ourselves any chance of getting there, we’ve needed to be honest with ourselves about what a plausible path to achieving them is, and what roles we can play. 

We’ve uncovered a ‘core’ Nesta approach for social change: innovative, practical experimentation that creates the proof-points for large-scale impact, whether through policy, replication, attitude shifts or other means. But within that core approach, we’ve had to adapt our skills and tools to the specific contexts of each mission theory of change. For example, with our healthy life mission we’re more confident that building confidence in policymakers and industry to make changes to the food environment is the primary route to halving obesity. Whereas in our sustainable future mission, while policy change is still critical, we also think there’s a role for public-facing information and campaigns to give consumers confidence to shift to low-carbon heating. 

Being open and specific about your plans to reach a mission is important for another reason too: mission working and social innovation is a team sport. We knew early on that we had no hope of reaching our missions if we acted alone; we needed to work alongside a broad church of other partners and collaborators. By setting out our stall explicitly, it’s easier to know how to work within a system. It means others can look at your plan and (hopefully) think: ‘they’ve got that bit of the problem covered, I can focus over here instead’, or, ‘if that’s the biggest problem, let’s all row in the same direction and get more energy behind solving that specific part of the challenge’. 

3. You need to be responsive and flexible, rather than pursue a mission plan dogmatically

To try to achieve our narrow mission goals, we’ve learnt that we need to at times go beyond them. That’s for a few reasons. 

Firstly, building on the idea that missions are a team sport, you need the scope to build strong, enduring relationships. If we were just to pursue a narrow topic area with a tightly defined mission goal (like ours on obesity or early years educational inequalities) without engaging with wider concerns (like public health or the education system more generally), there would be lots of potential partners or stakeholders who would be less likely to give us the time of day. Connected to that: these challenges we’re seeking to tackle are interrelated and systemic. If we were to focus too narrowly on them, we’d also be unlikely to be successful.

Secondly, the world is always changing: new technologies arise, society’s values shift and political priorities move. To give ourselves the best chance to make progress on our missions over the longer-term, we need to adapt our approach to these changes. For example, when we launched our mission-driven strategy in 2021, the potential of technologies like generative AI were far more limited than they are today. Now, they have the capability to transform mission areas that we care about, whether that’s tools for early-years practitioners or heat pump engineers, to name just a couple. And that applies to a whole swath of new technologies and methodological innovations. Our Discovery Hub has played an important role here: scanning for new technologies or methodological innovations that could be game changing for our missions. 

4. It’s important to regularly articulate and align on a story of progress to keep momentum and course correct as needed 

Given the challenge of walking the tightrope of mission-driven working (being laser focused on a plan, while staying open and responsive enough to spot opportunities and bring others along with you), we’ve found it important to hold what we call ‘progress reviews’ three times a year. These are moments when our leadership community come together and align on where we stand on our mission-driven strategy, and what we need to improve. To do that, we’ve tried a few different ways of measuring progress and impact: particularly complex given the ‘moonshot’ nature of our missions.

As part of these progress reviews, we identified ‘boosts’ to make larger organisational shifts that we thought could give us a better chance of reaching our missions, and to course correct for changes in the external environment. For example, in the run-up to the election and subsequent change of government, we accelerated our policy proposal development to give ourselves a better chance of landing key proposals (eg, our policy plan for heat). 

These learnings are by no means exhaustive. And we’re still relatively early on our journey. At Nesta we’re committed to working out in the open and sharing as we go: if you or your organisation are also looking to work with a mission-driven strategy, we’d love to hear from you and share notes.