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.

Solutions designed using behavioural science are generally more effective and long lasting, establish vital foundations for success and generate important social capital for the hard work of change.

Curiosity Incubator teaches us proven systems and frameworks to transcend our behavioural environments and unlock new thinking.

It accelerates progress in culturally literate ways that grapple with the concrete challenges we face in our organisations, work and lives.

HOW WE DO IT

Curiosity Incubator provides tools, frameworks, and a specific lens 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, at scale.

We explore how the effects of behavioural environments and ways of working, communicating, and designing can impact how people make decisions, interact, collaborate and participate.

WHAT IS BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE

Behavioural science is the science of solutions.

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 interventions which work in changing that behaviour.

Behavioural science is a practical approach for how to create solutions that will not just survive contact with human decision making, but fully leverage its power.

BRIDGET GILDEA

Bridget is the founder of Curiosity Incubator. For more than 20 years, Bridget has worked to create novel, innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, fuelled by behavioural science and behaviourally-informed systems insights and frameworks.

WHO WE ARE

Bridget is a Visiting Scholar at the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College, Cambridge, where the Curiosity Incubator was itself incubated, and is a Member of the Board of Advisors for the Cambridge University Behavioural Insights Team.

As a Consultant for Public Good, she works with organisations like the European Climate Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Council of Europe, AstraZeneca's Sustainability team, Cambridge City Council, and the London College of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, on applying behavioural science approaches to learning, skills and knowledge acquisition, with a focus on the future of work, sustainability and social justice.

She writes about the application of behavioural science to learning, innovation and "challenging" policy areas like corruption control, democratisation, sustainability and equity; teaches behavioural science and behaviourally-informed systems innovation at Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership, Cambridge Zero, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Royal Society of Arts, and has so far created over 120 applied learning programmes For Good around the world.

Here's more on the Curiosity Incubator formation and process is in this episode of the Curiosity that Matters podcast series.

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-focused 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.