Our applied researchers work within and across Nesta’s mission teams in order to enable high-quality impactful research throughout and across Nesta’s portfolio. 

In order to effectively scale our work at Nesta, we need to understand, design, and test our ideas in a way that is underpinned by research best practices and guided by our innovative methodological expertise. 

We seek to explain if, to what extent, and why a proposed solution has or has not been successful, what factors have contributed to a result, and what lessons we can learn about research and practice. We generate knowledge and evidence on how to manage the process of scaling to ensure that promising solutions can scale up their impact. We do this by working closely with diverse teams (designers, data scientists, behavioural scientists) at Nesta.

Almost every project at Nesta uses mixed-methods research or evaluation methods. We work across mission teams to use the most effective research methods in order to translate insights into scalable, real-world impact, be that be iterative evaluation, robust trial design, or collaborative co-design.

Specifically, we routinely adopt randomised controlled trials as the gold standard method to investigate causal impact, coupled with qualitative insights such as focus groups, interviews, and diary studies to dive deeper into how the solutions we are piloting were implemented and received.