There is currently significant interest and investment within food innovation from lab-grown meat to personalised nutrition and digital tech for weight loss.

In this project, we aim to cut through the hype to better understand what advances in such technologies might mean for Nesta and others working on public health.

This Innovation Sweet Spots project will support the mission’s goal of halving the incidence of obesity in the UK by 2030 by providing insights about emerging food innovation that could help us reach this goal.

Our work will build on the previous Innovation Sweet Spots project, which investigated green technologies with the potential to decarbonise home heating. This time we also plan to explore further datasets and foresight techniques for making sense of our findings.

The Discovery Hub has developed the Innovation Sweet Spots approach in order to help Nesta to trace the buzz around a technology or innovation back to the source, allowing us to critically interpret signals and make more informed calls about which innovations are close to a tipping point where they will have impact in the real world.

We will analyse large quantitative datasets related to research activities, private investment and public discourse that are commonly only considered in isolation. By bringing these together we will build a multi-dimensional picture of innovations and technologies.

We will also carry out a further analytical or 'sensemaking' stage involving a broad range of stakeholders including early stage investors, scientists, health practitioners and policymakers. This will involve the use of several strategic foresight techniques. Combining data analytics and foresight will enable us to better identify how the different innovations may impact Nesta’s healthy lives mission of halving obesity by 2030.