Scaling up Social Impact Summit
Join us as we address the "scale-up problem" in evidence-based policy solutions at the Scaling up Social Impact Summit!
The promise of evidence-based policy is to identify interventions that, when delivered at scale, improve outcomes in broader society. Yet, many ideas fail to scale: although effective in smaller controlled trials, the benefits of these interventions dissipate when the policy is rolled out to larger units or over a more extended period. Confronting this “scale-up problem” is a major issue confronting empirical social science and public policy.
The House of Governance and Public Policy (GaPP) is organizing a interdisciplinary conference of leading public policy scholars engaged in creative solutions in this area. The aim of the conference is to build a community of scholars and research in Sweden focused on a global study of these issues, as well as facilitate direct links with Swedish policy making and Swedish businesses. The Stockholm School of Economics, and GaPP in particular, are uniquely well-positioned to take this on given its position as the leading business school in the Nordics, the explicit 115-year-old mission of SSE to improve Swedish competitiveness and directly benefit society, and the deep connections with both global academia and Swedish business and policy.
Our global ambition is best illustrated with the two distinguished keynote speakers we propose for the conference.
Prof. John List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he was Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2012 to 2018. He is best known for being one of the pioneers of field experiments in economics and has also worked actively to bring these insights to industry, most recently as Chief Economist at Uber and Lyft. He has also written extensively about the science of scaling including his recent book The Voltage Effect, written for a general audience.
Prof. Dana Suskind is Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center (UChicago Medicine); director of UChicago Medicine's Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant program; and founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago. A substantial part of her recent research has been on translating research insights to enduring and large-scale transformation in early childhood development.
In addition, we will organize a panel discussion that brings our keynote speakers together with leading Swedish policy makers and/or business leaders to draw general insights for practitioners.
Preliminary program:
08.30 Welcome and breakfast
09.30-10.15 Keynote: John List: “Scaling Social Impact”
10.15-11.00 Keynote: Dana Suskind: “Health Interventions at Scale”
11.00-11.30 Panel Discussion: Invited policy experts
11.30-12.30 Lunch & Mingle