Curiosity Incubator at the Intellectual Forum: an 'Accelerator for Good' - CI featured in Jesus College, Cambridge Annual Report

The Intellectual Forum at Jesus College, Cambridge - the birthplace of the Curiosity Incubator - recently featured an article about our origin story, and how we came to be, in the most recent Jesus College Annual Report (pp 39-42 - link here). We had a lot of fun working through with editor Kate Coughlin what our origin story actually is, how to distil the themes on which we draw, the influences to our work and framework, and what makes the Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good different from other work and programmes.

Article page 1 - pages 2-4 worth delving into, especially for the more illustrative photos!

Key nuggets:

"...This work at Harvard took an action research approach to policy and learning programmes co-creation with governments around the world and looked at how to tackle both challenges in bureaucracy and in creating participatory methodologies that really work for social and civic cohesion. Key findings from it were instrumental in the early design of the Curiosity Incubator, and as the learning from its iterations went on, we also found ourselves returning frequently to the question often posed to academia by policymakers when talking about relevant ideas: ‘Sounds great – how?’.

This focus on not just the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ of public policy work also drew on learning from our work with the UCL Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose.

This involved co-designing applied learning frameworks and programmes with government partners in Brazil, Barbados, Peru and South Africa. Getting under the skin of the ‘how’, in moving from the vision of mission-oriented government approaches spearheaded by Professor Mariana Mazzucato and faculty colleagues, to grappling with the complexity of implementation, was pivotal. Together with outstanding public servants across the world, we co-created solutions in an applied learning framework, exploring how to do the work of making academic theory in these realms practicable.

Then, in finding out what works and what doesn’t, and bringing that learning back into theory creation.

In the Curiosity Incubator, we do this by facilitating participatory and behaviourally-informed ideas creation processes to tackle complex social challenges.

We focus on creating spaces for collective inquiry, experimentation and practical action, throughout our two-day workshop for a small group at Jesus College. We help policymakers, organisations and communities navigate uncertainty and co-create solutions, by moving from ideas inception through a rigorous process of sense checking and testing their ideas, ready for launch.

By building these solutions together, both from Place-based learning (‘bottom up’) and from international and national levels of policymaking (‘top down’), we put cross-sectoral collective intelligence and applied learning at the heart of the programme..."

Much more illustrative photo from the Curiosity Incubator - collective intelligence happening!

What’s next?

"We’re building a more intensive version of the Curiosity Incubator programme, in a hybrid online into in-person workshop at Jesus format, for a small cohort of participants, Lent Term 2026 onwards. It will incorporate all the richness of our learning so far with additional ideas testing sessions and learning loops to test out and bring back what worked and what didn’t, in the weekly cadence of online sessions.

Curiosity Incubator is also going further out into the world, with sessions for cohorts in and from Eastern Europe, Africa, and the US on the horizon, looking thematically at areas of focus like the application of behavioural science to human rights frameworks for refugee populations, and to pandemic preparedness. We are also building new work looking at our perennial focus of how to build better learning programmes for innovative and impactful work in government, here in the UK. If you are interested to hear more, please get in touch via our sign up page.

Check out the full Annual Report here.