Innovation Tag: Behavioural Insights

Renovate or Rebuild was a collaborative project that set out to increase the uptake of sustainable homes in the Australian residential sector. The show took an innovative approach to embed behavioural and building science into an engaging, yet informative and impactful TV series, that promoted and normalised sustainable homes. Research estimates this project could save Australians $600 million on their energy bills and would cost less than $1.60 for every tonne of greenhouse gas abated.

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, relief organizations and government agencies lacked data about events on the ground and struggled to mount an effective response. New methods of event detection were urgently needed. A research team comprised of country experts and computational social scientists created a Twitter-based event detection system that provides geo-located event data on humanitarian needs, displaced persons, human rights abuses and civilian resistance in near real-time.

Tackling the effects of rising urban heat goes beyond objective physical measurements. For sure, technical services are in need of blended indicators about the effects of local policies: under which conditions tree planting, fountains, urban design contribute to reduce island heats. The project has created such tools, but is also willing to take seriously into account the subjectivity, the perceived heat, the sensations of our citizens, for they contribute hugely to our collective resilience.

Mind the Class, a mental health prevention organization, is partnering with school systems to reduce the risks and reverse the rates of mental and behavioral health disorders by creating a community ecosystem. This full year project collaboratively designs a preventive implementation plan using proven wellbeing research and data-driven solutions in collaboration with our University of Warsaw partners and through local public and private partners support sustainable development.

PAZOS is an innovative alternative to dealing with the historically high juvenile homicide rate by using public force. It was developed because the city of Palmira was among the most dangerous cities in Colombia and the world; today we have the lowest homicide rate in the city's history. We attribute this achievement to an articulated and focused intervention, oriented to the dual functionality of targeting public spending and generating opportunities through policymaking.

The "Living Together Promoters" program began in early 2020 as an initiative of the Cordoba City Hall. It is considered innovative because it seeks to promote change management within the Administrative Misdemeanor Court by using diverse methods from behavioral and data sciences. Specifically, to provide evidence about the institutional status quo, and to assess the potential impacts of modifying social behaviors and norms inside of the institution.

The number of traffic accidents resulting in human casualties have not shown any significant decrease in Estonia over the past ten years. While velocity is one of the factors to significantly increase the severity of the consequences, user-centric approaches also lead to the realisation that in Estonia speeding is a widely accepted social norm. An innovative approach was developed in order to test the effect of losing time, instead of money, as a potential measure to affect drivers’ behaviour.

Cash transfers, recognized as one of the most effective tools in social protection, are expanding rapidly into the world’s poorest economies. As these programs support more of the world’s most vulnerable populations, they face growing demands to increase their effectiveness. Light touch interventions from behavioral science help make programs more adaptive to the psychological phenomena that influence beneficiaries’ decisions and actions and improve outcomes at little additional cost.

Governments have increasingly adopted remote work due to COVID19. So far, there has been no comparative assessment of how teleworking has affected the public sector. The People in Government Lab, together with an international team of researchers from 12 universities is running a study in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and the United Kingdom to understand the organisational advantages of teleworking, and to evaluate how behavioural sciences can improve public employees’ wellbeing and performance

High-tech Research Infrastructures (RIs) require large budgets, high operating costs and extensive human resources, making them available only to a small number of prominent researchers. Up-and-coming junior researchers or technical staffs from SMEs, who account for the majority of technology development, are therefore not able to utilise expensive RIs. The South Korean government planned and established the national RIs governance system to solve this issue and fairly allocate opportunities for…