Rotman Management – April 2019

12 / Rotman Management Spring 20 19

Four Roles for Behavioural Insights

The Value-

creation chain

of product

development

Pre-marketplace: Within the Organization

In the Marketplace:

The Last Mile

Stage 1:

Define goals, strategy

and operating principles

Stage 2:

Design and develop

product, program

or service

Stage 3:

Prepare to

go-to-market

Stage 4:

In-market: End-user

interacts with product,

program or service

Roles that BI

can play

BI as Designer BI as Auditor BI as Problem Solver

BI as Chief Strategist

Bing Feng (MBA ‘19) and

Jima Oyunsuren (MBA ‘19)

are Research Associates and

Project Leads at Behavioural

Economics in Action at Rot-

man (BEAR). Mykyta Tymko (Rotman Com-

merce ‘19) is a Research Associate at BEAR.

Melanie Kim (MBA ‘16) is BEAR’s Research

Coordinator and Dilip Soman, the Rotman

School’s Canada Research Chair in Behav-

ioural Sciences and Economics, is the Founding Director of BEAR.

Editor’s Note:The BEAR Playbook has contributed to the thinking on behav-

iourally based efforts at various organizations, including the OECD, in their work

on the application of behavioural insights to public policy. The Western Cape Gov-

ernment in South Africa and the Impact and Innovation Unit in the Government

of Canada aim to use its content to strategically embed BI into their work.

pact measurement and behavioural insights. It offers services
through a core unit at the Privy Council Office and through
the fellowship model, in which scientists are deployed to other
Government of Canada departments and agencies to provide
behavioural science expertise and run behavioural insights trials.
At press time it had deployed five behavioural scientists across
the government.

THE INTERNAL CONSULTING APPROACH. The World Bank’s Mind,
Behaviour, and Development Unit (eMBeD) is a behavioural sci-
ence team housed within the Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global
Practice. The team works closely with World Bank project teams,
governments and other partners to diagnose, design and evalu-
ate behaviourally informed interventions. The eMBeD unit cur-
rently has 16 employees working on 49 projects across nine the-
matic areas in 65 countries.

THE BEHAVIOURALLY INFORMED ORGANIZATION APPROACH. As indi-
cated by the Evree example, in these cases behavioural science
is foundational to the entire organization and to all streams of
its work.

In closing
The early years of BI as a field were marked by a need to score
quick wins and find proof-of-concept for this approach to engi-
neering behavioural change. Now that the field has gained broad

acceptance, we expect organizations to start using it to tackle

more complex behavioural and policy challenges going forward.

In our view, BI can — and should — play a key role in important

societal domains such as the environment, business sustainabil-

ity, preventive health, and diversity and inclusion. Consider this

article as a nudge to get you started.

FIGURE TWO