As part of our commitment to turn ideas into action and transformative innovations, in 2025 we incubated the first cohort of the Exploration Co-Lab and launched two open calls: Sparks of Regeneration, and Edges of Possibility.
In 2025, the Exploration Co-Lab incubated its inaugural cohort of seven systems innovators, supporting visionary leaders working at the forefront of transformative change. The Co-Lab provided seed funding tailored to each innovator’s needs, alongside dedicated branding and storytelling support to help clarify and amplify their narratives. Participants also received legal and financial guidance, personalised leadership coaching, and access to trusted networks that expanded their reach and strengthened strategic partnerships. This was a holistic and flexible approach we co-designed with a global group of experts, the Critical Minds. As a result, more than 50% of the cohort reported increased confidence in the development and advancement of their innovations.
Others are taking this momentum further by significantly scaling their impact. Sarah Queblatin’s initiative, Living Story Landscapes, for example, has grown beyond a regional focus and is now engaging with national and global policymakers.
Our branding and visibility support has also had positive results. As highlighted in Cristina Chaminade’s Scaling Conservation report, there is significant underinvestment in communication within the nature conservation innovation space, despite its critical role in driving awareness, adoption, and systemic change. Recognising this gap, we have intentionally stepped in to strengthen the storytelling capacities and prominence of our innovators. We know that effective communication is not a last-minute add-on but a core lever for impact, enabling solutions to reach wider audiences, influence stakeholders, and unlock further support. Our work therefore focuses on equipping innovators with the tools and narratives needed to amplify their work and accelerate change.
Samyukta Manikumar’s Noctura and Gal Zanir’s Nature Perspectives have already established a strong online presence, while two further initiatives – Wakanyi Hoffman’s African Folktales Project and Olivia Lazard’s Transition Intelligence – are in the final stages of development. In another case, Ulrico Grech-Cumbo used this support to launch a successful crowdfunding campaign for FutureZoo, helping to unlock additional funding and propel the project forward. To sustain this progress beyond our initial engagement, we partnered with organisations that complement the value we bring. Through this extended support ecosystem, Gal Zanir of Nature Perspectives joined the accelerator programme run by our partners at Brainforest, securing additional funding in December 2025.
These early indicators demonstrate the impact of our scouting and incubation efforts, while also signalling a growing commitment of capital towards unconventional, system-level innovation for nature, offering early evidence in support of our theory of change.
“As innovators we require an environment that is more open, more nurturing and more flexible. Being part of the Exploration Co-Lab has been amazing and the fact that they (Unearthodox) really encourage a kind of radical thought - supporting us to cross disciplinary boundaries and to experiment and to not have the pressure of confining the work into a single box.” – Samyukta Manikumar, 2025 Exploration Co-Lab
We also saw strong peer bonds and mutual amplification emerge this year, with concrete partnerships among innovators. We intentionally created safe spaces for innovators to come together, share, and build trust, and we were delighted to observe how naturally their collaboration emerged. In 2026, we will build on our learnings and invest more in identifying and leveraging these connections to unlock meaningful synergies.
In collaboration with the Post Growth Institute, we published the report Nurturing Innovation: Weaving containers with care and courage for collective change on alternative models of support for innovation focused on social impact, sustainability and regenerative practices over profit.
This report was the output of a year-long process and has directly informed how we are evolving our incubation programmes across the portfolio. In particular, it highlighted the importance of designing and holding incubation spaces rooted in care and potential, rather than starting from a mindset of deficit or problems. In response, Unearthodox has elongated the beginning of each incubation cycle, allowing time for relationship-building, identifying needs, and tailoring support blocks before entering delivery mode. This way, the incubation journey is shaped with the cohort rather than imposed upon it.
Furthermore, in collaboration with our partners at Climate KIC, we delivered a workshop exploring a community-led, place-based approach to innovation. Fifty-four participants joined from climate-innovation organisations and post-growth and systems-change groups, as well as a wide range of NGOs, entrepreneurial ventures, universities and regional energy agencies. The diversity of backgrounds and sectors highlighted a strong interest in rethinking growth models and advancing slower, more relational approaches to innovation and systemic impact.
The call was a global invitation to innovators, disruptors and changemakers to submit bold ideas for regenerative futures across areas such as nature conservation, climate, food systems, governance, and beyond. Aiming for around 500 submissions, it exceeded expectations, attracting 576 submissions from 88 countries, and surfacing projects that transform tensions between worldviews into living experiments in regeneration.
Eight innovators were selected through a process that surfaced diverse perspectives and forms of leadership, spanning a rich range of themes from food systems, rights of nature, and governance, to mental health, non-human voices, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). They will enter a phase of collective incubation in early 2026.
We intentionally designed the application and review process as a holistic experience, seeking to reflect the principles of regeneration. Balancing accountability with a lighter, more meaningful approach, we aimed to create a process that was respectful of applicants’ time and inner work. The feedback was really positive: many applicants reported that the process felt transformative, even if they were not selected. The questions invited pause, reflection, and a rethinking of their work in more relational ways. These learnings will be carried forward into our work and future open calls.
With the Edges of Possibility open call, we drew 501 applications from 92 countries, with a strong emphasis on amplifying marginalised voices. Insights from our ongoing monitoring and evaluation are informing and shaping the cohort’s strategic direction and design.
Urgency & Deep Time
Responding to urgent crises while ensuring actions are rooted in the ancestral wisdom of the place and its people, honouring the generations before and after us.
Context:
Climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequalities demand immediate action, but regenerative approaches involve deep, intentional healing that takes time.
Invitation:
How might we design for flexibility, responsiveness, and growth without becoming chaotic or incoherent? How might we let something new emerge without forcing it into pre-existing boxes? Where is the structure needed for safety, and where can you leave room for emergence?
Balancing personal responsibility and inner healing with deep structural shifts. Ensuring the burden does not fall on the individual alone, but working collectively so that systems, institutions, and structures also evolve.
Context:
Neoliberal approaches often place the responsibility of change on individuals, while systems (policy, economy, governance) often remain unchanged.
Invitation:
Where should innovation begin - with individual transformation, cultural shifts, or structural change? And how do these levels speak to each other? How might our work avoid placing disproportionate burden on individuals, while still cultivating agency, accountability, and collective momentum?
Technology is but a tool and cannot replace the care, trust and relationships that bind living systems.
Context:
Technological interventions are easily measurable and scalable, while relationships based on care and trust are harder to ‘quantify’.
Invitation:
How can we ensure that technological solutions are also guided by relational wisdom and not just efficiency or scale? Who and what is held sacred in the design process? How can innovation improve relationships rather than replace or instrumentalise them?
A bold, honest act and not a shinier version of the extractive system that maintains the status quo.
Context:
Regenerative approaches often get absorbed and aligned into the very structures they are trying to shift.
Invitation:
How might we protect truly regenerative vision from becoming a more ‘sustainable’ version of harm? How might we root truly radical change in care rather than spectacle?
Honouring ancestral and place-based wisdoms while navigating the existing and deeply embedded colonial structures and institutional realities.
Context:
Regenerative and Indigenous ways of knowing often challenge dominant, institutional logics about funding, metrics, and legitimacy.
Invitation:
How might we ensure that regenerative innovation navigates institutional terrain without being captured by it? In what ways could it hold space for ancestral, land-based, or community-rooted wisdoms that institutions often cannot see, name, or hold? How might we make room for refusal, for reparation - not just inclusion?
Rooting in place, people, and story - while staying in solidarity with global movements and shared planetary challenges. Protecting local knowledge without isolating it.
Context:
Working at the local level ensures relevance and trust, but can be limited in scale. Global collaborations help spread ideas, but risk overlooking local cultures and ecological needs.
Invitation:
How might regenerative innovation stay rooted in the specific needs and histories of a place - while also being in dialogue with broader systems of learning and solidarity? How might we protect the sovereignty of the local while honouring the relational nature of global engagements?
Shifting from extracting ideas to building with communities and ecosystems. Moving beyond consultation toward shared ownership and mutual learning.
Context:
Knowledge, particularly that passed on through oral traditions and cultural practices, has too often been dismissed as unscientific and unreliable.
Invitation:
How might we co-create this regenerative innovation with communities, ecosystems, and epistemologies that are often excluded from formal knowledge systems? Who is involved not just in testing or feedback, but in imagining and shaping the very foundations of the innovation? What forms of reciprocity can we build in?
Staying open to the unexpected and new while ensuring trust, accountability, and momentum.
Context:
Project timelines often push for structure, deliverables and seek control. Regeneration invites us to be comfortable with uncertainty and allow space for the unknown to emerge.
Invitation:
How might we design for flexibility, responsiveness, and growth without becoming chaotic or incoherent? What if we let something new emerge without forcing it into pre-existing boxes? Where should we include structure needed for safety, and where can we leave room for surprise?
