We know the best insights and ideas come from those closest to the issues, and that the challenges of our time cannot be solved by any individual or single idea alone.
Brink has proven approaches for capturing and supercharging diverse and non-obvious ideas through competitions, challenges and venturing support.
Governments, donors and philanthropic organisations partner with us to design and run funds that invest in portfolios of ideas, unearth deep insight and create spaces for learning.
Brink specialises in crowding in ideas through:
Global competitions like COVIDaction (2020-2021) that mobilised £5.3M for pandemic tech solutions
Sector-specific challenges such as the Assistive Tech Impact Fund supporting 6 African countries
Venture stage-specific initiatives like Hanga (2023-present) funding pre-revenue SRH innovations across Sub-Saharan Africa
This approach combines:
Catalytic grants (£20K-£200K) with technical matchmaking of problems with ideas for solutions
Partnerships to accelerate time from experimentation to evidence with expert organisations on a theme or place like UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering or AfriLabs
This is for you if:
You have a defined problem but no idea how to solve it, or need a fresh approach because all you’ve tried so far has been unsuccessful
Across Brink’s work with FCDO, city mayors, the World Bank and everything in between, we’ve heard the same thing time and again: “it’s easier to sign off £50m than £50k”.
We design programmes and funds to address this challenge, by creating a space for innovation to be freely pursued within existing organisations or systems. Typically this involves designing a combination of a fund, non-financial support and innovation culture that supports investigating, testing and proving (or not!) the validity of an idea in order to catalyse change in the bigger system.
Brink addresses cultural and systemic barriers to innovation through:
Dedicated funding vehicles like the £25M EdTech Hub (2020-present) influencing national education policies
City-level programs such as the Africa Smart Towns Network supporting 11 municipalities with €50-55K grants to test digital initiatives that eventually shifted city hall strategy
Frontier technology experimentation across FCDO including £14.3M in drone/AI pilots for development challenges
Key features include:
Adaptive grant structures (from £25K ideation grants to £500K scaling funds)
Creating conditions for innovation cultures within existing bureaucracies and forging pathways for mainstreaming innovation like OECD and FT Hub
Lean methodology coaching that helped Kampala reduce traffic solution development time by 40% and mainstream innovation methods and new services into city hall strategy
Read more about our approach to innovation carve-outs in our whitepaper.
This is for you if:
You’d like more experimentation and innovation within your existing team or organisation, and you’d like to mainstream that innovation
Most challenges of our time don’t exist in a vacuum. They are part of complex systems, shaped by human behaviour and worked on by teams and organisations. To truly address these challenges, we must work with these systems and the people in them.
Transforming systems requires bold goals, collaboration across borders and sectors, and a participatory approach that values local expertise. When the path ahead is uncertain and one idea isn’t enough, missions unlock the way forward. They call for a unifying vision, intentional investment in multiple diverse approaches, and a readiness to learn and adapt as new insights emerge. It also requires intentional activity and investment at multiple levels and likely a mix of portfolios running concurrently, addressing different parts of the system.
Brink’s CoLabs projects such as the Oxygen CoLab and the Vaccine Data CoLab do this by:
Bringing together stakeholders to build a long-term vision
Realising that vision collaboratively (the ‘Co’ in CoLab) and experimentally (’the Lab’) to keep our progress and impact grounded in the real world
Deploying capital proactively and collaboratively
Providing non-financial support that goes beyond access to expertise and innovation coaching, to include building learning networks and advocacy groups, and feeding into existing global coalitions
These missions combine:
Multi-stakeholder coalitions (governments, corporates, NGOs, innovators, citizens)
Concurrent investment in product innovation + service models across multiple portfolios
Learning networks and advocacy groups, feeding into existing global coalitions
This is for you if:
Your work involves entangled challenges requiring coordinated action across fragmented systems
The best person to get in touch with is Alex, our Innovation Director and you can email her on alex@hellobrink.co.
