Annual Review 2025

Common Mission Project sits at a precise and purposeful intersection: a government investing billions in the sectors of tomorrow; a generation of young people with the raw talent and ambition to drive that investment forward; and a skills system that has not yet built the bridge between the two. We are that bridge.

In seven years of operation, we have engaged more than 1,400 Master's-level and final year undergraduate students across 28 UK universities in solving live, unclassified challenges sourced directly from the Ministry of Defence, the Department for Transport, and the Home Office. Our students build thousands of repetitions by practicing problem solving in partnership with the organisations that most urgently need it. They graduate the course with government literacy, entrepreneurial confidence, and a mission-driven methodology that neither a lecture hall nor a commercial internship can replicate.

Across the eight priority sectors of the UK Industrial Strategy, capital is not the constraint. The capital is there, the need is clear, the talent exists. What has been missing is a programme that connects all three. That is our purpose. This report is an account of how we are delivering it.