Altruistic Capital Lab
The preceding two decades have seen an unprecedented shift in re-imagining the purpose of the corporation and the future of work. This shift in the importance of 'social impact' in the private sector can be seen through significant investments organizations make and an increase in employees' preference for greater meaning in work. Although organizations are investing billions of dollars in social impact and more employees are keen to have meaning in their work, there is little evidence guiding this flow of capital and labour.
To address the need for a new framework for understanding social impact, as well as generating evidence to understand what works and why, Professors Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera launched the Altruistic Capital Lab. This Lab is the hub of learning and deep collaboration between leading scientists and large-scale firms and organizations, dedicated to building the largest global evidence base on understanding and creating social impact in the corporate sector.
Increasingly, we have observed that many of the market inefficiencies in the developed and developing worlds are not separate from each other. By leveraging field sites in countries such as the UK and Zambia to uncover these underlying commonalities, the Altruistic Capital Lab is dedicated to revealing insights that transcend geographical and socioeconomic boundaries.
The Altruistic Capital Lab aims to understand not only what social impact policies work but why they work, thereby enhancing our understanding of human motivation and organizational culture. This enhanced understanding, in turn, will push the scientific frontier within the discipline of economics, which has traditionally embraced a narrower model of self-interest and monetary incentives. Through the process of generating this knowledge, together with practitioners on the ground and leading scientists, we aim to build a movement dedicated to using rigorous scientific tools to learn how to maximize our social impact.
