Popular searches

About Nesta

Nesta is a research and innovation foundation. We apply our deep expertise in applied methods to design, test and scale solutions to some of the biggest challenges of our time, working across the innovation lifecycle.

More about us

The Small Ideas Initiative

This project started in October 2026 and will end in April 2027

Crowdsourcing practical, non-controversial fixes to make life better.

The Small Ideas Initiative is a non-partisan project founded by Martin Lewis OBE (MoneySavingExpert), and run by Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence and Involve. The project will crowdsource the public’s ideas for practical, non-controversial ways to improve the UK, help turn them into professional policy, and then campaign to make the best ones happen.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Small Ideas Initiative. It's quite simple. We need your small ideas to make Britain a better place, to fix it if you like. So if there's something that annoys you or irritates you and you know how to make it better, we want you to tell us. Then we're going to collate all of those ideas and filter them to ensure that they meet our criteria, which is they must be non-controversial, not too expensive, appeal to a good cross-section of the country and be either something that has a big impact on a small number of people or a small impact on a big number of people. At that point, we'll take the top 200 or so ideas and put them through a panel of academics and experts to turn them into professional policy. Then we'll send the long list back to you so you can feed in on what you think the most important ideas are. And finally, I will sit down with a panel representing a wide section of British political opinion, senior politicians and others, if you like, and we will pick 50, turn it into a manifesto and then campaign for that change to happen.

That combination of small ideas could have a big impact. But it all starts with your small idea. So please tell us it.

Martin Lewis video introducing the Small Ideas Initiative

Visit the website

About the Small Ideas Initiative

When governments take office, they often focus on major structural reforms like growth, taxes, defence and the NHS. While these are important, big initiatives are often controversial and slow to deliver. Meanwhile, practical, low-cost fixes that could solve people’s daily frustrations - from clunky administrative rules to confusing forms - can be overlooked because they are not seen as "big enough". 

Launched in October 2026, the Small Ideas Initiative is a year-long experimental project created to give the UK public a structured, credible route to turn their lived experiences into workable policy solutions. 

The campaign hopes to find Ideas that are practical, doable, and cheap enough that the government, a council or regulator could actually say yes. And above all, ideas that are hard to argue with: the kind of idea 8 in 10 people, regardless of politics, would agree with.

Ideas will be filtered by the Nesta team and refined by external policy experts before going back out to the public for feedback. 

The final shortlist will be chosen by a cross-party panel of politicians and experts, chaired by Martin Lewis, including:

  • Jonathan Bartley, councillor and former co-leader, Green Party
  • Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire, Labour Party
  • Tamara Finkelstein, chief executive of the Royal Academy of Engineers, and former permanent secretary
  • Danny Kruger MP, Reform Party
  • Polly Mackenzie, former Director of Policy, Liberal Democrats Party
  • Penny Mordaunt, former Leader of the House of Commons, Conservative Party
  • Emma Roddick MSP, Scottish National Party
  • Kwajo Tweneboa, social housing campaigner

Our role

Nesta's Centre for Collective Intelligence has worked with Martin Lewis on the design of the Small Ideas Initiative. We’re responsible for leading the digital public engagement campaign and for filtering the public’s ideas, using a combination of AI and human review. 

We're excited to launch this initiative thanks to a charitable donation from Martin Lewis. His huge following and ability to reach audiences who wouldn't typically engage in digital democracy initiatives provide a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between everyday public experience and political action.  

Involve will provide administrative support to the cross-party panel, which will choose the final shortlist, and convene external policy experts to help refine the public's ideas into credible policy proposals. 

Together, our goal is to show how collective intelligence can capture small-fix ideas and elevate solutions from communities across the UK, building cross-party support behind ideas that make day-to-day life better for everyone.

The campaign will run from October 2026 until late Spring 2027. 

For more information, visit small-ideas.org

A powerful ecosystem for innovation

We extend our impact through two specialised units that help people and organisations to solve complex problems and achieve their goals.

BIT

BIT helps clients from government, nonprofits and the private sector to improve people’s lives through our empirical problem solving and deep understanding of human behaviour.

Challenge Works

Challenge Works designs and runs challenge prizes to spark innovation in science, technology and society.