The Social Science Research Council recently launched a series of new Agenda Fund initiatives focused on accelerating public innovation, or the discovery and implementation of more effective ways of delivering public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, growth-oriented infrastructure, and scientific and technological innovation. In this President’s Desk essay, SSRC President Anna Harvey reflects on how emerging research on the determinants of innovation in governments and universities can help us design, test, and implement evidence-based strategies that accelerate public innovation.

The SSRC has been asked to join the UN’s new scientific advisory network, sharing insights into how the social and behavioral sciences might contribute to more effective science and technology policy. In this post, SSRC President Anna Harvey shares the SSRC’s initial contributions on the UN’s priority issues of artificial intelligence, climate change, and biotechnology.

The 2023 SSRC Centennial Lectures showcased a shared focus on not only describing problems, but also finding solutions to those problems. SSRC President Anna Harvey reflects on what it means to pursue research designed to solve problems, and how the SSRC can most effectively support problem-solving research.

The Social Science Research Council recently submitted a response to an RFI from the National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund, detailing how the NIH could improve the reliability of evidence in behavioral research by borrowing the idea of master protocols from the field of oncology. Master protocols are coordinated multisite trials followed by meta-analysis designed to assess both the internal and the external validity of interventions across populations. Here, we share a related submission to an RFI from USAID, suggesting that master protocols could also help USAID achieve its goals of improving the quality of its social and behavioral change (SBC) programming while simultaneously ensuring responsiveness to local SBC priorities and centering locally-led SBC research teams.

Social Science Research Council President Anna Harvey shares a recent submission to an RFI from the NIH’s Common Fund, detailing how the NIH could improve the reliability of evidence in behavioral research by borrowing the idea of master protocols from the field of oncology. Master protocols are coordinated multisite trials, followed by meta-analysis, to assess both the internal and external validity of interventions across populations. NIH support for master protocols to evaluate the impacts of behavioral interventions on outcomes like vaccination uptake could significantly advance the policy relevance of evidence in behavioral health research.