Launched in February 2025, the discovery scaling accelerator is part of Nesta’s work to embed scaling into how we design, test and deliver projects. We make radical ambition the default, ensuring its feasibility by bringing the right stakeholders into the room early, and tying activities together into coherent scaling plans. At its core, the Accelerator is about building Nesta’s organisational capability for scaling while supporting individual projects to achieve system-level change.

The accelerator is already working across multiple missions, helping teams to think bigger and identify new opportunities for growth. Projects such as Start at Home, Tiny Happy People and our partnership with Asda have benefited from targeted support to design scaling strategies, test financial models and develop strong relationships with government, industry and community stakeholders.

The discovery scaling accelerator helps Nesta deliver on its missions by ensuring promising projects reach the scale required for major real-world impact. Our goal is twofold: to increase Nesta’s organisational capacity to scale impact across our missions, and to support specific projects to grow into system-level interventions. By embedding practical scaling skills, tools and mindsets into our processes, the accelerator upskills teams to think ambitiously, connect with the right people and deliver change at a level that matters.

Scaling is often the hardest part of innovation, with promising projects reaching only a fraction of the people or systems they could influence. Too often, scaling skills from financial modelling to stakeholder engagement are unevenly distributed across teams. This risks limiting the impact Nesta can achieve.

The discovery scaling accelerator addresses this challenge by providing targeted, expert support at the moments that matter most. Our early work has shown that involving stakeholders at the inception of a project is critical, as it allows us to align interests and design routes to scale from the start. It has also highlighted that scaling requires distinct skills and confidence to pursue ambitious options. By embedding these lessons into Nesta’s ways of working, the Accelerator strengthens both individual projects and the organisation’s wider ability to achieve change.

Through the discovery scaling accelerator, Nesta teams gain practical, hands-on support to design and deliver scaling strategies. This includes:

• setting ambitious goals, making the most impactful options the default
• building warm, supportive and frank relationships with stakeholders, including government, regulators, funders and industry leaders, and exploring innovative, out-of-the-box ways to engage them
• encouraging teams to broaden their stakeholder horizons, proactively identifying ambitious or unconventional partners beyond the initial list to unlock new scaling opportunities
• identifying and creating new routes to scale, from financial innovations to regulatory change
• developing clear, executable plans that bring all these elements together.

The accelerator operates flexibly: team members contribute part of their time, cross-pollinating insights across missions and connecting scaling practice with Nesta’s broader strategic goals. It is already supporting projects like Start at Home (green transition skills), Tiny Happy People (early-years text messaging) and the Asda partnership (food health trials), while advising on new opportunities such as integration pathfinders (forthcoming) and clean heat neighbourhoods.