By Dr Jussi Tolvi, co-founder and behavioural lead at Club Soda

Club Soda is a social startup business. We use technology to help people set goals for their alcohol use, and to reach those goals. We also work with pubs and bars, nudging them to being more welcoming for mindful drinkers – customers who want to drink less or not at all.

One of the key values of Club Soda is to use evidence in everything we do, from product development to content creation. We benefit enormously from research findings, seminars and conferences, and talking to academics about their work. And we know that our customers (though we prefer to call them members) also like it that we have some science behind us.

We would like to do more research and evaluation work ourselves as well, but the reality is that we just do not have the resources for much of it at the moment. Most academic research grants may not be measured in millions, but we have to make do with much less, and without secure monthly salaries to fall back on.

And we would love to collaborate more with our academic partners. Of course we will always help them find study participants when needed, and will happily share what we have learnt. But we also have to think of ourselves a bit: if a grant funded academic team creates an app in our domain, it might not be in our best interests to have that app freely available to our potential paying customers. We will always have to have one eye on revenue to pay for our continued existence.

Understanding consumer demand is not a bad thing for academic research either. There is real value in learning from and about people who have made a choice, and spent their cash on a product or service offered to them by a business. Club Soda is more than a set of behaviour change techniques. We offer people membership in a tribe: who you get sober with is as important as who you get drunk with – and we know there is fascinating research material in our community on this topic too!

There is bound to be some tension between academia and business. Sometimes we will have shared aims, sometimes not. We won’t always understand where the other one is coming from. But we believe it is beneficial for us both to keep cooperating, learning from, and sharing our unique areas of expertise.

With that in mind, I wonder whether there are particular types of businesses that academic researchers would prefer to work with?

BIO: Dr Jussi Tolvi is a former academic and City worker, now co-founder and behavioural lead at Club Soda, a startup nudging people and licensed venues towards healthier and more mindful drinking. He studied economics before behavioural economics was fashionable, so has had to work hard to forget most of what he learned at university.

By John Blythe, Research Associate at UCL Centre for Behaviour Change

If you work in academia or industry, you will have at some point heard about the benefits of collaborating with one another. This may have been through public engagement discussions or from your research and business department. Industry and academia are often seen as quite separate entities, where one is fast paced, organisationally driven, and the other is slow paced and research driven. Either way, knowledge transfer between the two is important for continued development of the sectors. Industry can play many important roles in academia such as acting in an advisory capacity, to participating in research projects or providing sponsorship for internships, research projects and knowledge transfer partnerships. In this blog post, I will be talking about my positive and negative experiences of working with industry for study participation.

My previous work has involved research into organisational psychology so understandably working with industry is part of what I do. Studying employee behaviour requires access to actual employees, and as such, the many difficulties and challenges that are associated with participant recruitment. The positive sides of using organisational samples is that you can have measurable impact by providing organisations with feedback reports of study findings which can be used to improve organisational practice. You are also given access to a real world samples and the opportunity to explore occupational behaviour in its natural setting. In an ideal scenario, you would be given access to many employees and those employees would be allowed to complete your study during working hours. Realistically, organisational recruitment is a difficult task and not one that we are necessarily trained to do (as psychologists anyway).  Limited time resources, restricted sample access or withdrawal from studies are just some of the many issues you may face.

My experience of working with industry has largely depended on the nature of the topic I am researching. When I have researched employee wellbeing, access to occupational samples has been relatively straightforward as it is often of interest to the organisation’s HR department. These departments often welcome this kind of research as it is in line with the strategic aims. However, for the last four years I have been exploring cyber security behaviour in organisations. This hasn’t been the easiest topic to recruit for. HR departments weren’t as interested in the topic as it is not something that was of the greatest concern to them, and often considered to be the problem of IT departments. I encountered greater interest and engagement from stakeholders when I worked with individuals from IT departments, but that often brought about new issues as they did not often have access or the authority to give me access to the employment samples. Furthermore, organisations do not want to be associated with poor cyber security practices which can often be identified in this kind of research, and this was an issue that hampered recruitment. You may remember the TalkTalk[1] or LinkedIn[2] breaches that have plagued the media in the last few years and the ultimate impact of this on their business reputations. Understandably these stories create concerns for companies. However, these reputational concerns can be alleviated through non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Ultimately, the process of organisational recruitment requires perseverance and contingency planning to ensure timely completion of your project.

Here are some tips for aiding your organisational recruitment:

1. Accessibility of your research – draft a research proposal, highlight benefits for taking part and make it easy to understand for your target audience
2. Identify the right stakeholder – find the department most interested in your study findings or input
3. Manage relationships – things happen a lot quicker in industry and by the time you have gone through the many research procedures, they may no longer be interested. Ensure timely updates and be transparent during initial contracting.
4. Alleviating concerns – consider NDAs or any other contractual or legal issues such as intellectual property during initial stages if the topic is particularly sensitive to the organisation

Researchers, what tips do you have for working with industry? And those in industry, what are we researchers missing?

BIO: John is a Research Associate at the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change and conducts research on the interaction between work, technology and psychology. His previous research has focussed on changing employee cyber security behaviours, understanding users’ trust in e-health websites and exploring the links between employee engagement and occupational performance. Currently, he is investigating protective behaviours in the context of the Internet of Things as part of the PETRAS Hub (http://www.petrashub.org/). 

References:

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/02/talktalk-cyberattack-costs-customers-leave

[2] http://fortune.com/2016/05/18/linkedin-data-breach-email-password/

By Chris Holmes, behaviour-change lead at C3 Collaborating for Health

“Really, is there need for collaboration? Why? What can another sector bring, be it academic, private, not-for-profit or public that we can’t already do ourselves? Won’t that mean there is less to go round? I don’t know who to talk to. It just gets messy and resources are wasted wading through legalese. (I am a little bit scared)” All things that get said, thought and, in my experience, on too many occasions become reality.

Yet in building things that make a sustained difference in people’s lives, we face diverse challenges that need to be overcome: designing solutions that work, packaging them in a way that engages people emotionally over time and finding a way of sustaining an ongoing cycle of redesign and reengagement that builds and maintains scale.

In my commercial experience, different functions (R&D, production, finance, marketing, sales) often in different organisations provided these diverse skills. There was disagreement and plenty of tension but what brought them together was a common language – the simple profit equation of revenue minus costs – which if not delivered at the right level meant a shared problem – unemployment.

In our hearts, each of us knows that we and our organisations don’t have all the skills needed to overcome these challenges, but collectively we do. Yet we persuade ourselves that delivering the project plan, writing the report, getting published, meeting the funder’s outputs or launching a product defines success. Don’t get me wrong, these are important landmarks in the process but they don’t necessarily lead to sustained, positive changes for people and that is what matters.

Learning a new language is hard, especially when you don’t even know which language you need to learn. For me the question is not whether collaboration is necessary but what common language can bring us together. That’s what this network is all about – finding that common language and learning to speak it.

So, network what is our common language and how do we learn it?

BIO: Chris Holmes recently completed three years as C3 Collaborating for Health’s lead on behaviour change. C3 Collaborating for Health is a global charity that tackles four major chronic diseases (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease and many cancers) by focusing on the three biggest risk factors: tobacco, poor diet and lack of physical activity. Prior to working with C3, Chris studied for a Masters, set up NHS London’s Behavioural Insight Unit and led the programme for the Department of Health that became Change4Life. Before turning his attention to social issues, Chris spent 15 years in the commercial marketing field, including the role as marketing director for Mondelez UK’s confectionary business.