As part of the core faculty of the PopTech Social Innovation Fellows Program, faculty member Robert Fabricant shares his insight and experience at the PopTech Conference last week. Impressed while working with the young leaders of social innovation in for-profit and not-for-profit worlds, Fabricant focuses his lens on the study of behavior to push for social impact.
“So what am I doing here? I don’t know much about the power grid in Namibia or low-cost diagnostics in Saudi Arabia. It’s interesting to be in a position of expertise with a group that has gone down roads and achieved things I don’t think I could achieve myself. My focus, as always, will be on behavior. I continue to see social impact largely through that lens. So we will be doing a deep dive into how you create the right conditions to drive changes in behavior. I will work with the group to help them answer the following questions:
- How do you link a set of behaviors together to achieve the desired impact of your intervention?
- How do you design prototypes and other interventions to test your assumptions around behavior and the underlying motivations that will support behavior change?
- How do you look at the barriers to behavior change and use them to your advantage?”