Nathan Kably
INNOVATION LEAD
London, UK
Nathan is an Innovation Lead who backs ideas that matter. He leads innovation and investment funds for good, and coaches tech ventures and larger organisations on how to build, grow, and sustain meaningful innovation. Currently, he leads The award-winning Frontier Tech Hub's portfolio fund of early-stage tech ventures. With a passion for working at the intersection of creativity, strategy and problem-solving, Nathan loves wrangling wild information into coherent opportunities, and validating them through robust experimentation. Using a blend of lean startup, research methods and strategy, his work generates impact through evidence-informed, human-centred solutions.
Before joining Brink, Nathan worked on the design and delivery of Nesta's 2030 strategy - a UK based innovation and impact investment organisation with an endowment of £300m. Prior to that, he also worked as a researcher and project manager for a varied set of international projects, mainly in relation to the circular economy and climate innovation. Nathan holds an MSc in Public Policy and Human Development from Maastricht University/UNU-MERIT, and a BA in European Social and Political Studies from UCL.
Nathan loves fiction. Especially the kind that reinvents things. He believes in its power to convince hearts when minds are just not enough. And so he once invited creative writing into a complex strategy process, working with a poet to uncover new sides to some of the stickiest societal problems. A side that is unmistakably human - where any real social change has to begin.
Questions they're exploring
- What does it actually take to back the right early-stage venture? Not just the idea, but the team, the timing, the conditions that let something fragile become something real?
- Can you fund for good and fund for growth, or do you always have to choose? Innovation and investment don't always speak the same language. What does it look like when they finally do?
- What separates organisations that talk about innovation from ones that actually live it? After coaching ventures and large organisations alike, I keep coming back to this. The gap is rarely about ideas. So what is it about?