ABOUT US
WHAT WE DO
Change starts with curiosity. Our problems are increasingly complex and critical, and our current ways of finding solutions are often unable to rise to the challenge.
Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good teaches us proven systems and frameworks to transcend our behavioural environments and unlock new thinking.
Curiosity Incubator co-discovers the specifics of the challenges we face, bringing to bear insights on how we as humans think, behave, collaborate, and work. It helps craft more effective solutions the concrete challenges we face in our organisations, work and lives.
Accelerator for Good accelerates co-created progress on these core challenges, crafting more effective solutions for us as individuals, in our cities, neighbourhoods and workplaces - all the way up to population-level solutions at scale, and back again.
Knowing and applying what works on each level and in each context is what sets us apart from the norm - and what helps you craft critical solutions that will really work.
HOW WE DO IT
Curiosity Incubator is a co-discovery, accelerated applied learning approach that provides tools, frameworks and insights to help transcend our behavioural environments.
It accelerates progress in breaking through the current barriers that hamper your work.
We use detailed examples of what’s worked around the world and in local communities to help you craft and hone the work you do to create change for good, up to a population-level scale, and back again.
We explore how the effects of behavioural environments, Place-led insights and different ways of working, communicating, and designing can impact how people make decisions, interact, collaborate and participate, building collective solutions that really work, together.
HUMAN AND BEHAVIOURAL
SCIENCES
Human sciences draw on a diversity of disciplines to understand the full context of how we as humans interact, collaborate, and behave. Behavioural science is one of them - the science of solutions we can craft for ourselves as individuals, in Places, and as a population at large.
Often, frameworks for understanding why people make the decisions they make, and behave in the ways they do, are founded on ideas of how people “should” behave. Behavioural science is the study of how people actually behave, and proposes new thinking and approaches in allowing us to changing our behaviour - as individuals, in Places, and for population-level collective solutions.
Human and behavioural sciences form a practical approach for how to create solutions that will not just survive contact with human decision making and environments, but fully leverage their collective power.
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BRIDGET GILDEA
Bridget is the founder of Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good. For more than 20 years, Bridget has worked to create novel, innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, fuelled by human and behavioural sciences and applied insights and frameworks, together with road-tested approaches to solutions creation from people, to Place to population, to international levels, and back again.
WHO WE ARE
Bridget is a Visiting Scholar at the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College, Cambridge, where the Curiosity Incubator was itself incubated, and was a Member of the Board of Advisors for the Cambridge University Behavioural Insights Team.
Through the Accelerator for Good, she and the Curiosity Collective alumni team work on accelerating critical solutions with organisations like the European Climate Foundation, Open Society Foundations, MacArthur Foundation, the Council of Europe, Brazil's Ministry for Management and Innovation in Public Services, the Government of Barbados, New York City, AstraZeneca's Sustainability team, Cambridge City Council, the London College of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and many others, on applying knowledge of how we as humans work to frameworks for solutions success.
She writes about the application of human and behavioural sciences, Place-led insights, and 21st century policymaking frameworks, to to learning, innovation and "complex" policy areas like public health, sustainability, democratisation, civic co-creation, and governmental and large organisational transformation. She teaches behavioural and human sciences, public innovation and behaviourally-informed systems approaches at Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership, Cambridge Zero, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge Judge Business School and the Royal Society of Arts, and has so far created over 120 applied programmes and projects For Good in over 40 countries.
There is more on the Curiosity Incubator formation and process is in this episode of the Curiosity that Matters podcast series. From 2022-2025, she also led the Applied Learning portfolio at UCL Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose, crafting learning, innovation and capacity and capability building programmes with the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation, National School of Government of South Africa, ProInnovate Peru, and the governments of Brazil and Barbados.
Previously as the Director of Programme Development at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, she founded policy-focused programmes, including the world’s first practitioner behavioural science programme, with Professor Brigitte Madrian. This also included partnerships with the MacArthur Foundation on behavioural science and corruption control in Nigeria; with the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Berlin for the German Bundestag; the Inter-American Development Bank on digital transformation in government; the US Census Bureau in Washington DC, and a 5-year partnership with the National School of Government and Gnova Innovation Lab in Brazil. Before that, she led the Policy & Universities portfolio in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office's US Network out of Boston.