Location: London, UK

Nathan is an Innovation Manager at Brink. He leads interdisciplinary teams to design and deliver innovation services, supporting teams to test and grow impactful ventures and interventions. 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, design and strategy, his work generates impact through 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 sustainability transition pathways. 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. He once invited creative writing into a complex strategy process. How does working with a poet help understand an organisation’s unique value proposition? He can tell you how he witnessed his colleagues, after writing about their personal relationship to health and heat, see a totally new side to some of the stickiest societal problems. A side that is human and possibly at the core of any social change project.

Questions Nathan is exploring in their work right now:

• How and where does investment and innovation in e.g. EdTech produce most impact?
• Which approaches (e.g. innovation, research) bring most value in what context, and to solve what problem?
• How do you create change through more experiential means (design fiction, experiential futures, creative facilitation, etc.)?