It’s a SHAPE venture because the founder did a SHAPE degree - The venture is defined by what its product or service is, not the background of the founder.The second problem is that behavioural science is only a fraction of the breadth and diversity of SHAPE subjects - and many -dare I say the most exciting SHAPE ventures will be based on other disciplines from SHAPE If it’s just augmenting a product like most tech startups then calling it SHAPE is meaningless as all tech would become SHAPE. A SHAPE venture is one that ‘human/ behavioural science informed’ - The key here is whether the product or service is primarily built off research or just uses behavioural science to make the main thing have higher user retention or usability (such as silicon valley startups use of Stanford’s Behavioural design lab).It’s important both venture types are supported and the risk of suggesting all are social would undermine those for-profits if for example they were seeking investment Early data does suggest about half of SHAPE ventures I’ve seen are social ventures, there is still the other half that are not. ‘Social ventures are SHAPE ventures’- Morven Fraser-Walther and I wrote a whole post on this.Evidence to Impact (Public Health) - delivers research-based public health interventions (such as smoking reduction in teenagers)Ĭommon misconceptions about SHAPE ventures.OxCarbon (Geography)- Which verifies Carbon offset projects through satellite data and research backed methodologies.This mostly means a researcher from a SHAPE discipline is building a venture based on their research (I’ll be giving lots of detailed examples of this over the course of the substack) but for now some examples Due to the paucity of the ventures in this space (I’d estimate there are fewer than 100 globally) there is a tendency for people to badge things up as SHAPE in a well-meaning but in my opinion unhelpful way, my definition is the following:Ī SHAPE venture is one where the product or service is primarily built on SHAPE research. With the definitions out the way we can now understand what a SHAPE venture is. SHAPE needs an equivalent collective, single identity if it wants attention and investment SHAPE is politically expedient - STEM is a well understood term, with plenty of politicians and policy documents talking about STEM skills, STEM startups, STEM degrees.Others are providing business services like algorithms or novel datasets - Economy People and Economy captures venture types - The ‘P’ for People and the ‘E’ for Economy work well for the venture types we see in SHAPE ventures, some are social ventures tackling problems from supporting parents with special needs children to teacher mental health - People.It’s an impact function - SHAPE is mostly about how these disciplines create impact, you don’t need SHAPE to allocate research grants to particular disciplines but it is very helpful for thinking about graduates outcomes or venture types.The S, H and A belong together - at least when building a venture, startups from these 3 discipline areas have more in common with each other than with STEM ventures (a subject for a future post).However there are several further elements that make it especially useful: So SHAPE is quicker and less embarrassing to say out loud. AHSS - one better but forces you to say “ASS” out loud like an idiot or pronounce each letter (and life is too short - and why have an acronym if it takes as long?).SSH - it misses the Arts and therefore is not helpful. However, the more I use SHAPE the more I like it. Initially I was sceptical, academia is replete with acronyms which only serve to obfuscate the sector further and there is a history of attempts to categorise subjects such as STEAM (A for Arts) which never really took off. Professor Julia Black (Director of Innovation at LSE and President of the British Academy) coined the term SHAPE - Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for people and the economy in 2022. Please note these are my definitions and possibly disputed. For those looking for the more exciting start-uppy stuff like case studies, sector overview that’s all coming. Today’s post, the first of the series (the last post was the amuse bouche that allowed me to put off writing anything substantive for another two weeks) focuses on what SHAPE is and what a SHAPE venture is.ĭefinitions are dry but SHAPE ventures are new and a clear definition is important for understanding what they look like and the distinctive value they bring.
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