Nesta 2030:
Our new strategy

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Nesta’s purpose has always been to support innovation for social good. In our new 10-year strategy, our purpose remains constant, but the way we achieve it will change substantially.

We will now focus our energy and resources on three innovation missions: a fairer start for every child; a healthy life for all, and a sustainable future where the economy works better for people and the planet.

We’re optimistic. We believe that large-scale, meaningful change is more possible now than ever before, if we combine our most important assets - people, data, money and culture - in new ways.

We look forward to learning with you as we set out on our next journey.

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Ravi Gurumurthy,
Chief Executive
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Read more about our reasons for optimism

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Our reasons for optimism

Today’s society is rich in resources: immense human and cultural capital, a wealth of data and an increasing role for social returns in the allocation of finances. In the face of huge societal challenges, our optimism lies in the opportunity we see to harness these resources; by finding new ways of using and combining them, we can unlock their potential.

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People

The actions and behaviours of citizens and frontline practitioners are among the biggest determinants of health, learning and economic well-being. Over the past decade, our shared understanding of the drivers of human behaviour, including the effects of environment and context in shaping choice, has expanded tremendously. Public policy pays insufficient attention to the drivers of behaviour, leaving countless opportunities to harness and strengthen motivations and capabilities and create more supportive choice environments and more user-friendly services.

Data

A data revolution is taking place in almost every part of our economy and society. There is immense potential to push the boundaries of how data is used in public services and social movements – such as identifying problems earlier using predictive analytics, matching resources with needs more accurately, tailoring services in highly personalised ways and combining human and machine intelligence at scale.

Money

Both private capital and public investment can be used more effectively to drive impact. At Nesta we have been pioneering the use of alternative finance for some time, but significant unfulfilled potential remains. For example, procurement rules often strangle innovation, leaving an untapped opportunity for public and private procurement to support the initiation and scaling of good ideas. Meanwhile, shifting resources from treatment to prevention on issues such as obesity could result in a step change in health outcomes.

Culture

We know that arts and culture can inspire, mobilise and reshape how people think about the world. We’ve brought support and investment to the arts and creative industries, but there remains untapped power in arts and culture to reframe our work, shape public opinion and galvanise community action.

What does Nesta do?

What does
Nesta do?

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We are the UK’s innovation agency for social good. We design, test and scale new solutions to society’s biggest problems, changing millions of lives for the better.

For more than two decades we have worked to support, encourage and inspire innovation that benefits society, a purpose that is more relevant now than ever.

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A short history of Nesta

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Nesta’s evolution

Nesta was launched in 1998 with £250 million of National Lottery funding, making it the UK’s first ever publicly supported national endowment. We are a very different organisation now, having constantly reinvented ourselves in response to changing times.

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Investing in talented innovators

1998 - 2003

In the first five years our focus was on enabling talented people to develop original ideas and, in some cases, commercialise them.

Phase 1

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Improving the UK’s capacity to innovate

2003 - 2012

A major review of Nesta’s work saw us pivot away from supporting individual innovators in favour of enhancing the UK’s capacity and systems for innovation.

Phase 2

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Innovation for public benefit

2012 - 2020

We became an independent charity in 2012 and our focus shifted towards innovation for public benefit. We went on to play a vital role in defining and shaping the field of social innovation in the UK and around the world.

Phase 3

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Mission-driven innovation

2021 - 2030

In 2021 we launched a new mission-driven strategy. Significantly improving the lives of millions of people through innovation is now at the heart of our new vision.

Phase 4

Our vision

Our vision

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By 2030 Nesta will have significantly improved the lives of millions of people. Combining rigour and creativity, we will be a world leader in driving innovation for social good.

Our innovation missions

Our innovation missions

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We will pursue three innovation missions.

Each mission is a response to a generational societal challenge, one where we believe innovation has a big part to play in driving large-scale change.

We will set bold goals for our missions that may seem unrealistically ambitious, but which we hope will act as a lodestar that lifts our sight.

  • A fairer start

  • A healthy life

  • A sustainable future

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A fairer start

We want every child to have an equal start in life. Our mission is to narrow the outcome gap between children growing up in disadvantage and the national average.

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A healthy life

We want good health for all, particularly those most affected by existing inequalities. Our mission is to increase the average number of healthy years lived in the UK, while narrowing health inequalities.

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A sustainable future

We want an economy that works better for people and the planet. Our mission is to accelerate the decarbonisation of household activities in the UK and improve levels of productivity.

A fairer start

What's the challenge?

The circumstances of our childhood set us on a trajectory that affects the rest of our lives, with children born into disadvantage being far more likely to experience poorer health, lower earnings, a shorter life expectancy and lower levels of happiness than their peers. Taken together, the early years (ages 0–5) and secondary school period (ages 11–16) account for the development of 80 per cent of this divergence in life outcomes.

What will Nesta do?

Our goal is that, by 2030, the UK will have eliminated the school readiness gap between those born into deprivation and their peers, with similar gains at age 16 among students receiving free school meals.

Our programmatic focus will be on early childhood and secondary education.

Find out more about our fairer start mission.

A healthy life

What's the challenge?

Over the past decade the increase in UK life expectancy has slowed dramatically and health inequalities have widened. One of the starkest truths we face is that the poorest in society die around nine years before their more affluent peers, and experience ill health almost two decades earlier. This gap is socially determined: the conditions in which people live and the opportunities available to them shape the extent to which they can be healthy. Related negative outcomes such as loneliness and high blood pressure contribute to the greatest loss of healthy life. Obesity, which affects 35 million adults in the UK, and loneliness, which affects 9 million people, account for a disproportionate risk to healthy life across the UK.

What will Nesta do?

Our goal is to halve the prevalence of obesity by 2030. This would increase healthy life expectancy by an average of nearly two years for around ten million people in the UK, while narrowing health inequalities between the richest and poorest in society.

Our programmatic focus will be on tackling food environments. In addition, we will be exploring loneliness.

Find out more about our healthy life mission.

A sustainable future

What's the challenge?

The UK urgently needs to make progress on reducing emissions if it is to meet the legally binding goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 (2045 in Scotland).

At the same time, productivity in the UK is far below that of comparator countries. These challenges go hand in hand: an economy that succeeds in reducing emissions but does not protect or improve economic well-being is no more sustainable than one that is productive but fails to reduce emissions.

What will Nesta do?

Our goal is that, by 2030, the UK will have reduced household carbon emissions by 28 per cent from 2019 levels, and will be on track to reach zero by 2048.

Our programmatic focus will be on reducing household emissions. In addition, we will be exploring productivity.

Find out more about our sustainable future mission.

As we focus our activity on our innovation missions, three enterprises that Nesta has incubated will continue to support and shape the innovation ecosystem in the UK and beyond.

Read more about Nesta's enterprises.

Delivering our missions

Delivering our missions

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We will play three roles

In pursuit of our mission-driven strategy, we will take on three complementary roles: working as an innovation partner, a venture builder and a system shaper. They are mutually reinforcing and designed to address some common barriers to innovation.

Innovation partner

Venture builder

System shaper

Innovation partner

As an innovation partner Nesta will work closely with frontline organisations across the UK – such as local authorities, chains of schools and GP networks – to design, test and scale new solutions.

Our partnerships will help us to ensure the ideas that are seeded are contextually grounded, relevant and the product of multiple perspectives and disciplines.

Venture builder

Sometimes innovation requires a more radical departure from existing practice than is likely to be possible within large institutions. New and early-stage ventures have significant freedom to innovate, drawing on cutting-edge developments in different sectors. The rigours of the commercial market then act as a fitness mechanism, forcing ventures to iterate towards products and services for which there is significant demand from users or practitioners. Those that pass this test can then take an accelerated path to scale as revenue generated is reinvested in growth, and ventures are incentivised to move quickly to new markets.

As a venture builder, Nesta will create new ventures with the potential to generate long-term impact and value for users, communities and shareholders. We will also invest in established early-stage ventures, providing patient capital and supporting investees to achieve their impact objectives and potentially shift key markets.

System shaper

There are different barriers to innovation in each of the fields we work in. A lack of risk capital can prevent good ideas from being seeded. Tough regulatory barriers and unhelpful public sector procurement practices can limit early adoption. Sometimes innovations struggle to scale due to fragmented systems, a lack of funding for implementation and poor environments for peer networks or community-led initiatives. In some cases all of these factors apply.

Success as a system shaper will help to magnify the impact of our efforts by removing the usual barriers to scaling that we encounter in our work as both an innovation partner and venture builder. It will also help to improve the environment for innovation in our mission areas independently of any Nesta intervention.

Our commitments to equity, diversity and inclusion

Our strategy seeks to address some of society’s most deep-rooted inequalities. In order to succeed we must ourselves become both a more inclusive employer and a more inclusive innovator.

That is why we have committed to nine measurable goals to advance equity, diversity and inclusion through our work and within our workplace.

Read more about the nine goals and how we'll hold ourselves accountable for reaching them.

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Getting to 2030

Getting to 2030

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Our strategy sets a clear destination, and maps out the beginnings of a path to get us there. Should we succeed, it will be by standing on the shoulders of trailblazers, allies and critical friends who have encouraged, informed and challenged Nesta’s work throughout our history.

We cannot do this alone. We seek the engagement of multiple partners, and in return commit to working openly, sharing our successes and failures, and challenging ourselves to do whatever it takes to achieve our goals.

While the world we operate in will doubtless change rapidly and we will need to change with it, our guiding vision will remain constant.

We hope you share our vision and will join us as we seek to improve the lives of millions of people through innovation.

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Ravi Gurumurthy,
Chief Executive

Join us

Whether you are a frontline practitioner, policymaker, private company or innovator, we are looking for partners, friends and collaborators to develop ideas, test them rigorously and scale what works.

Get involved

Read the complete strategy

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