For the past four years, Nesta’s purpose as a mission-driven organisation has been to design, test, and scale new solutions to society’s biggest problems focused on giving children a fairer start by age five, halving obesity in the UK, and drastically reducing home carbon emissions.
This revised strategy marked a substantial shift for Nesta, moving us from being primarily an enabler to an active agent of change, seeking to identify and scale innovative solutions through broad coalitions. Several years into this strategy, we are increasingly confident in our approach. Our recent strategy update is an evolution, not a wholesale change, reinforcing our core ambition while acknowledging new opportunities. We are putting even more weight behind our missions, deepening our policy work, and tooling up for scaling the solutions we’ve identified.
We continue to see our role as threefold, with each part reinforcing the others. First, we operate as an innovation partner, designing and testing solutions directly with organisations on the frontline. This year, we continued impactful collaborations with retailers on health strategies, with energy companies on innovative clean heat trials, and with local authorities on integrated family support, while also exploring how AI can support early childhood development.
Second, we act as a venture builder, actively building and investing in innovative start-ups. Our ventures, like Carno, making clean heat transitions easier, and Ogma, an AI-powered speech and language therapy assistant, have continued to grow.
Third, we serve as a system shaper, influencing the policies and institutions crucial for embedding innovation and maximising impact. This role was particularly vital throughout the past year, as our Delivering clean heat report influenced the UK government’s warm homes plan, and our evidence-based advocacy, including our Blueprint for halving obesity, continued to shape national conversations around mandatory health targets for retailers and integrated early years policy.
Our three roles are most powerful when they work in concert, harnessing synergies to create exponential impact. Our policy work on health targets, for instance, is directly informed by our practical trials with major retailers, and our investments in clean energy solutions complement our advocacy for policy frameworks that accelerate decarbonisation. This mission-driven work is significantly strengthened by the contributions from within Nesta’s owned entities - our global consultancy, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), and Challenge Works, which designs and delivers high-impact challenge prizes. Together, we are a global powerhouse of applied research and innovation.
This year, BIT continued our impactful work, from developing and evaluating a global childhood obesity prevention initiative in multiple countries to pioneering research on promoting more effective use of insecticide-treated nets in Nigeria and Uganda. In education, we adapted flagship programmes like Grassroots and Tips by Text for the UK context, while also tackling school dropout rates in Morocco and absenteeism in Uruguay. Our work also extended to environment and sustainability, inclusive societies, and expanding international collaborations, including strategic support to the Abu Dhabi Government's Behavioural Science Group. We have also been at the forefront of exploring how AI can enhance research and solve social challenges, and we published world-class thought leadership – such as through resources like the EAST framework, which has been translated into multiple languages. This year, we have also reviewed and updated our brand positioning and identity.
Challenge Works has continued to demonstrate our global leadership in incentivising breakthrough innovation. This year saw the successful conclusion of major competitions such as the £8 million Longitude Prize on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), awarded for a rapid point-of-care test for bacterial infections, the inaugural £1 million Manchester Prize for AI solutions in energy, environment, and infrastructure, and the Aqualunar Challenge for lunar water purification. We also launched new initiatives, including the £1 million West Yorkshire Mayor’s Big Ideas Challenge to address health inequalities and the Smart Data Challenge Prize, designed to prototype innovative data use cases across the economy, alongside new partnerships with organisations like the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) and the Van Leer Foundation.
As an innovation agency, by our very nature, we are focused on the future and the possibilities that lie ahead. In the year to come, in each of our missions, we’ll continue to combine practical action through our experiments, prizes and venture building, with our crucial work to shape policies and institutions. We know the hardest part - driving impact at real scale - remains ahead of us, and it’s never been more important that, as a society, we collectively make progress on these issues and do whatever it takes to get there. We cannot do this alone, and we invite others who share our vision to join with us to create meaningful, lasting change.
