Impact Labs

Harvard Impact Labs provides funding and other support to Harvard faculty to launch impact labs or start a new line of work in an existing lab. Through these labs, faculty members and their students collaborate with practitioners and communities throughout the U.S. and around the world to discover and implement solutions to difficult social problems. These engagements deepen theory and basic social science, build a new body of impact expertise in the social sciences, and generate tangible real-world progress on problems that need solutions. 

What are Impact Labs?

Impact Labs involve deep collaboration between academics and practitioners to develop, test, and scale solutions to compelling social problems with the goal of improving people’s lives.  

They work closely with government, nonprofit, and/or private entities to jointly frame problems, develop learning agendas, generate and test hypotheses, iterate on intervention strategies, and scale solutions. This joint work enables rapid testing in real-world settings and provides insights to generate more effective, sustainable, and scalable solutions.

Impact Labs focus on solving social problems, which are any challenges that: affect a large number of people; have collective and not just individual implications; reflect a failure of markets, governments, and other institutions; and cannot be understood or solved without an understanding of the human behaviors, institutions, and interactions involved. 

Eligibility

To be eligible for funding from Harvard Impact Labs, Principal Investigators must be tenured, tenure-track, or full-time Professors of the Practice or Professors in Residence at Harvard and must plan to involve students in their labs. Faculty may apply as individuals or with colleagues at Harvard or other universities when there is clarity about the contributions and roles of each. Each PI can submit only one proposal at a time, but faculty can serve as co-investigators on multiple projects.

Funding is open to labs focused on solving any compelling social problem, domestic or international. We do not privilege a particular research method. The methods and approaches should match the problem and reflect a shared understanding among researchers and external partners about what kind of research will be most valuable. 

Funding Process

We award funding on a competitive basis. Proposals are reviewed for both scientific promise and potential public impact by Harvard Impact Labs faculty and staff, as well as academic and practitioner experts in the proposed subject area. To be notified of new calls for proposals, sign up for updates.