Incubating Innovation for Charities
Rethinking the Starting Point
This autumn, we had Stuart Pearson and Kurtis Massey from Citizens Advice Stockport Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford on the programme. Stuart and Kurtis have created an AI co-pilot named Caddy that, while still in beta, is being used by hundreds of people daily. Their journey isn’t the classic “two founders, venture-backed, scaling fast” startup trope. Instead, it’s a testament to the fact that meaningful innovation often starts from a very different place.
There’s a surplus of advice (most of it too generic to be useful) and resources for startups that come from central casting. But what if your starting point is a grassroots idea, born out of necessity, in a sector that doesn’t have access to venture capital or a tech-heavy network? Charities often create extraordinary solutions, yet they’re overlooked in conversations about innovation.
A few examples of the challenges we helped Stuart and Kurtis with:
Caddy has use cases outside of Citizens Advice SORT, the charity in which it was born. How can it best serve those customers?
Stuart and Kurtis have deep domain knowledge in the problem space they are solving, they haven’t just built a solution, they deeply understand the workflows, needs and wants of the users and customers of the product. How do we bring that knowledge to as wide a range of customer problems as possible so that the team provides as much value to the wider eco-system as it’s capable of?
How should Caddy be funded?
What obstacles and hurdles are there to attracting third party funding in these circumstances and how can they be overcome?
How can we set Caddy up to give it its best chance of reaching its potential and scale?
It was a pleasure to work with Stuart and Kurtis, we will keep in contact and call in on them (whether they want us to or not) when we are next in the North West.
A huge thanks to Sonya and Judith for their help with this.
My over-arching feeling having worked on Caddy is that whilst SSV will mostly focus on the traditional startup route, we will always provide a space where initiatives like Caddy can thrive. This means adapting frameworks to fit different growth journeys—whether that’s securing grants, finding mission-aligned investors, or simply scaling impact sustainably.
Innovation isn’t just about the product; it’s about creating ecosystems where ideas, no matter where they originate, can grow. For charities, that could mean focusing on how to turn mission-driven tools into scalable, impactful solutions—not for profit alone, but for change. Let’s make room for a broader definition of what innovation can look like—and who gets to lead it.