Global: Behavioural Insights

NRCan's Office of Energy Efficiency (OEE) Social Innovation UnLab (SIU) is working with program colleagues and Carrot Insights to deliver an energy efficiency rewards pilot via the Carrot Rewards mobile app. Our hypothesis: Engaging Canadians on their smartphones and gamifying learning and action will improve awareness and adoption of energy-efficient behaviours. The pilot is delivering results and entering its third phase this year (2018).

Carrot Rewards is a platform promoting healthy living and public engagement that leverages behavioural economics, mobile tech and the power of loyalty programs to motivate and educate users to make better everyday lifestyle choices for themselves, their families and the planet. Created in collaboration with public sector agencies, leading Canadian health NGOs and the private sector. With over a million downloads, Carrot is driving sustainable positive behaviour change on a population scale.

The OEE established a Social Innovation "UnLab" (SIU) to test an embedded innovation model and amplify energy efficiency policy and service impacts in Canada. The SIU creates value for energy efficiency stakeholders in three ways: Building relationships and capacity for energy efficiency policy and service innovation; Generating evidence and collective learning by co-creating and testing insights and interventions; Amplifying impacts by scaling learning and implementing what works.

A first of its kind (in our context), cross-jurisdictional partnership between three levels of government to research, co-design and test prototypes with citizens to inform and improve the experience and uptake of home energy efficiency labeling and reporting. The core team was comprised of representatives from Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan) Office of Energy Efficiency (OEE), the Province of Alberta’s CoLab, and the City of Edmonton with service design support from Situ Strategy.

Predictiv is a web platform that enables governments to test whether new policies and interventions work with an online population before they are deployed in the real world. The tests take 1 to 2 weeks to complete, enabling policymakers and Ministers to get answers to questions that would have taken months (or years) to answer in the past.