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BI-ORG NEWS
The BI-Org Partnership has Formally Concluded
After 5 years of intense work, the Behaviourally Informed Organizations partnership has formally ended. Please see our statement on the Sunset and New Beginnings.
This website and our work will be active, and we will continue to add new outputs to this page as they become available.
New BI Org edited book “What Works, What Doesn’t (and When)”
The latest title in the Behaviourally Informed Organizations series presents a collection of studies in applied behavioral research with a behind-the-scenes look at how the project actually unfolded. The cases show how behavioral science research is done – from getting inspiration to adapting research into context, designing tailored interventions, and comparing and reconciling results.
What Works, What Doesn’t (and When) is edited by Dilip Soman (University of Toronto), with a foreword by Michael Hallsworth (BIT)
BI Org Special Issue Magazine
For the past five years, the Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR) research centre has been home to an initiative known as the Behaviourally Informed Organizations (BI-Org) Partnership.
BI-Org is a collective of academic researchers, government units, for-profit entities, consulting firms, and consumer groups across the world working on how best to embed behaviourally informed thinking and practices in organizations.
The articles in this special issue of the Rotman Management magazine are some of the outputs produced over the course of the partnership.
ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP
Every organization is fundamentally in the business of behaviour change.
Whether it be a government trying to get business to comply with environmental regulation, a business trying to get its customers to be loyal to their products, or a financial advisor encouraging a client to start saving for retirement, behavior change is critical to organizational success. Despite its centrality to organizations, we do not have a good scientific framework for behaviour change, nor a good understanding of how organizations can embed insights from behavioural science into their operations.
Our Challenge
Our key challenge is to develop an overarching framework for using behavioural science. We ask; how can behavioural insights (BI) best be embedded in organizations to achieve better outcomes, improve the efficiency of processes, and maximize stakeholder engagement?
Our team brings together researchers from 25 universities and 5 non-academic organizations, and 20 partner organizations that include government units, for-profit entities, consulting firms, consumer groups, and academic centres.
The proposed partnership comes at a potentially transformative time for the field – BI has developed expertise in large-scale field experimentation and big-data analytics. Governments and businesses have been attracted to BI with its promise of developing human-centricity and efficient solutions, and a recent Nobel Prize in Economics to Richard Thaler (a key proponent of applied BI) has captures the imagination and spurred interest. The partnership approach allows us to build theory based on practical problems, and to test and refine them in field settings that have practical implications for our partners, for society, and for knowledge development.
Three Themes
Our overarching research question will be tackled in three themes with the goals of 1) developing a comprehensive framework of behaviour change; 2) extending and applying this framework to complex behavior change challenges (business and social); and 3) identifying mechanisms (resources, capabilities, and operating models) by which organizations can best deliver on the promise of BI.
We plan to use a spectrum of research methods (both qualitative and quantitative) to achieve this objective, and aim to produce outputs that include scholarly writing (e.g., journal articles, books, monographs), practitioner oriented materials (e.g., white papers, academic-practitioner conferences, guidebooks), and tools for consumers and citizens (e.g., tip-sheets, decision aides, podcasts).
We expect this partnership to make contributions to policy innovation, business excellence, and the science of behaviour change. By developing a framework for using behavioural science, this partnership aims to place Canada at the forefront of the growing and potentially impactful BI community worldwide.
The Players
CORE TEAM
The core team is based in the Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR) research centre at the University of Toronto.
RESEARCHERS
A team of 25 faculty researchers (from across Canada, the U.S., and internationally) lead the partnership’s research agenda.
PARTNERS
A group of 20 partner organizations (government, industry, and other professional and academic organizations) have committed resources to ensure success of the partnership.
Contact Us
www.biorgpartnership.com
Email: rotmanbiorg@rotman.utoronto.ca
Twitter: @UofT_BEAR
The Behaviourally Informed Organizations Partnership is hosted by the BEAR research centre at the University of Toronto.
