NESTA was set up by Act of Parliament in 1998 to help maximise this country's creative and innovative potential.
We are funded by an endowment from the National Lottery and use the interest to back people of exceptional talent and imagination. We do our best to offer the support they need to explore new ideas, develop new products and services, or experiment with new ways of nurturing creativity in science, technology and the arts.
We do this through a range of pioneering programmes, which you can read about in this section. As you'll see, these are incredibly diverse, with NESTA awardees working in every conceivable field of creative endeavour, from music to micro-biology, performance art to artificial intelligence.