The Good Lab

Good Lab was a collaboration of leading charities, industry experts and experienced innovators who worked together to design new ways for charities fund their life changing work. Our ambition was to create £250m worth of new income for the sector.

We believed that by collaborating and being open in our approach we could achieve things that no individual charity could achieve alone. By collaborating we hoped we'd encourage more diverse thinking, access amazing networks and build a broader base of support to help us.

And from the outset we agreed that we'd share what we learnt with the rest of the sector. So, three years later, we're very proud to share our lessons from this journey,

This report is a deep dive into the three years of work. It’s a long read so we’ve structured this into a few key sections:

• The why and the how of Good Lab - the context, set up, principles, structure and outputs

• Ten lessons learnt - what we learnt through living the process of radical innovation and the changes we made

• From Ideas to Ventures - an outline of the four ventures that Good Lab created

• The challenges with mission-led venturing - a case study of OnHand to highlight some of the challenges early stage mission-led ventures face

• Running collaborations - Five lessons learnt in running collaborations

• Outcomes - The six key outcomes from Good Lab and what’s coming next

We hope you make the time to read this, and that you find this report useful. If you have any comments or questions, please get in touch. Likewise, if you want to chat through this in more detail or for us to come and talk to your organisations about any of it in more detail please let us know.