Nesta’s family of specialist teams and enterprises are here to support and shape the innovation ecosystem in the UK and beyond. Their activity will have important benefits for our missions – with opportunities to leverage their expertise and blend their methods with others in pursuit of impact – and will help keep Nesta at the forefront of innovation globally.

These teams have all grown through new sources of revenue and partners, and now have global reputations in their fields. Get in touch with our specialist enterprises and teams below to find out how they can help you with:

• how to generate and apply behavioural insights to inform policy, improve public services and deliver results for people and society
• how to stimulate innovation through challenge prizes
• how to run experiments
• how to address complex challenges by combining data, technology and diverse groups of people

Nesta has been a founding shareholder of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) since 2014 and fully acquired the organisation in 2021. We work closely with BIT to apply behavioural insights to our own work in combination with our expertise in other innovation methods. Working with clients from public, non-profit and private sectors, BIT has a track record of success across a range of policy areas, from healthcare to humanitarian aid, economic growth to early years, social capital to consumers. BIT’s vision is of a world designed and built around the way humans actually think and behave. As well as direct work with partners and clients, the organisation also shares expertise and helps others build capacity and skills to apply behavioural science to their own work.

By offering financial rewards (alongside expertise, networks and public awareness) to whoever can first or most effectively solve a problem, challenge prizes de-risk the creation of breakthrough innovations. Challenge Works will continue to draw on its expertise and reputation in prize design to help Nesta and other organisations around the world to promote innovation and help diverse innovators thrive.

To meet productivity goals and help economies be more innovative, a more experimental approach to policymaking is needed. The Innovation Growth Lab, an initiative led by Nesta in collaboration with government partners, works globally to promote experimentation and ensure that innovation and growth policy is informed by new ideas and robust evidence.

By harnessing all the resources of intelligence available to us, we can get better at tackling complex problems. The Centre for Collective Intelligence Design combines novel data, digital technologies such as AI, and participatory methods to engage diverse groups of people in new ways. The Centre helps organisations use these approaches to generate new insights, create innovative solutions and make more inclusive decisions.