In my three-year undergraduate program, I quickly became bored of political science, fell in love with philosophy and intrigued by economics. At the end of the program, I was determined to further my studies in philosophy but the (then hidden) economist in me knew that more options are usually better and so I applied to postgraduate programs in all three of my majors.

By the time registration came around, I had heard nothing from the philosophy or political science departments, and so I fell into economics quite by accident. My social-studies self battled my way through the Mathematics Bootcamp that was required before you could be admitted and, when I received the requisite grade, I went to register for the course. Upon arrival, I discovered I had been accepted into all three programs. My stubbornness told me that I had worked so hard to get into Economics, I was going to stick with it.

And through this series of coincidences, I found my passion and my talent.

My first, official, foray into behavioural science was in a theoretical paper I wrote during my university years. Combining game theory and psychology, it looked at the effect of consumer altruism on the provision of public goods, like renewable energy. As time has gone on, I’ve had the great pleasure of working with many incredible teams from around the world, trying to solve the puzzle of human behavior in a variety of contexts.

In this time, it became obvious that there was something frequently missing in the field: behavioural science has, traditionally, been the playground of academics, with its subsequent focus on publishable, peer-reviewed, perfect results.

Companies, of course, don’t need publishable, peer-reviewed and perfect.  They just need results.