As part of the Cabinet Office and Nesta'’s Innovation in Giving Fund, 28 established charities have been selected to participate in the new Open Innovation Programme. The programme will support new concepts as well as using the reach and knowledge of existing charities to engage people in giving.

The Open Innovation Programme will enable charities to take innovative approaches to giving to a larger scale.  

The programme responds to the feedback from established charities about the need for practical and financial support to help develop new partnerships around innovations in giving.  It will use the successful approaches to open innovation that are increasingly common in commercial organisations to accelerate the pace and scale of impact of innovation in giving.  

The ambition for the programme over the next year is to support a group of charities with national reach and who want to use their expertise, networks, assets and capabilities to find new ways to engage more people in giving that supports their mission.  This could include finding new and more powerful ways of maximising donations, getting more people involved in giving their time or unlocking idle and under-used resources and assets for social goals. 

Helen Goulden, director of Public Services Laboratory, Nesta said, "The Open Innovation programme sets its sights firmly on working with charities who have identified big challenges they want to work on to increase giving. The charities that have been selected into the programme have demonstrated a real appetite and ambition to work with people and ideas from outside the sector to develop high-impact solutions and take great innovations in giving to scale."

Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society said, "The Open Innovation Programme will support charities so that they have the resources to develop new ways to engage people in giving time or money to charity. It's important that we give charities the means to develop their ideas and use some of the same inventive approaches that have been successful in the commercial world."

Over the next three months, the charities will receive coaching and peer support to develop their innovative concepts before being invited to submit proposals to take the ideas to scale and receive funding support. Successful applicants will then be selected later this year to receive a share of £1.5m funding from the Innovation in Giving Fund, as well as non-financial support, to implement their ideas.

The Innovation in Giving Fund was launched in September 2011 by Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society, as part of a £34m package to increase levels of giving. To date the fund is supporting a range of game-changing ideas, all of which can be found at http://giving.nesta.org.uk. 
 
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Notes to editor

For further information please contact Guy Bilgorri or Sarah Reardon 020 7438 2611 / 2606 or email [email protected] / [email protected]  

*Charities selected to participate in the first phase of the Open Innovation Programme:

About Open Innovation Programme and Innovation in Giving Fund:

The Open Innovation Programme is a strand of the Innovation in Giving Fund, which was launched in September 2011. The Fund is one of a number of new policies announced tin the Giving Whitepaper in May 2011. For further information please see www.cabinetoffice.giv.uk/resource-library/giving-white-paper

About Nesta: Nesta is the UK's innovation foundation. We help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. We do this by providing investments and grants and mobilising research, networks and skills. We are an independent charity and our work is enabled by an endowment from the National Lottery. Nesta Operating Company is a registered charity in England and Wales with a company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091. Registered as a charity in Scotland number SC042833. Registered office: 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE. www.nesta.org.uk