Our Vision

Zinc exists to build and scale a brand-new way to solve the most important societal problems faced by the developed world.

Our approach empowers the most talented and motivated people in the world to redirect their careers and have a large-scale social impact as entrepreneurs, researchers and intrapreneurs.

Mission-Led Approach

We focus on specific ‘missions’, which we believe unite, mobilise and organise the best talent, knowledge and capital that are needed to break through at scale. Within each of our missions, we run Venture Builder and Academy programmes that help individuals to have impact.

We have 3 criteria for choosing a Zinc mission:
1.    It must tackle one of the great unmet needs in the developed world;
2.    The target addressable market must exceed 100m people in the developed world alone;
3.    There must be lots of unexploited opportunities to disrupt, extend and improve existing services through new technologies and insights from research.

Since we launched in 2017, we have been developing a unique ecosystem of diverse talent across many sectors, disciplines and countries – mobilising people around a common mission and building scalable solutions to social problems.

Each of our programmes provide unique opportunities for R&D. We are committed to building a new commercial innovation system for the social sciences, to increase the impact of existing research and to generate new R&D opportunities through our ventures. Zinc’s main financial backer is the London School of Economics. Zinc is also a member of the ASPECT consortium which is focused on accelerating the impact of social science.