Behavioural Insights Team Opens Product Dev Unit

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), set up by the UK government and often referred to as the 'Nudge Unit', has launched a new division called BI Ventures, which will use behavioural science to build products to help solve real-world problems.

Set up by former UK Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 after he had read Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the unit's remit is to apply the authors' theory that people's habits can be changed without government regulation, by nudging them in the direction they 'should' go. In 2014, the unit was spun off into a mutual joint venture, with innovation charity Nesta, the unit's employees, and the government each owning a third of the business.

The new BI Ventures arm, which is led by BIT UK MD Owain Service and Head of Ventures Charlotte Bearn, has already launched its first product, called Applied, which offers a recruitment platform through which organisations can remove behavioural biases from their hiring decisions. According to the organisation, several studies have shown how hiring managers are affected by the names of applicants, while Applied's own research highlighted how recruiters are affected by the order in which they see information.

In a statement, BIT said: 'We are immensely proud of Applied, and the work that Kate Glazebrook, Theo Fellgett and Rich Marr - the founding team - have done to create such a great platform. We built Applied because we realised that it was difficult for most HR functions, even in big organisations, to keep up with the latest behavioural research on how to hire the best people. Even if you do know the research, the latest studies show that it's hard to apply these lessons in practice without implicit biases creeping in'.

Web site: www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk .