How we fund research for impact
Stanford Impact Labs’ investment strategy springs from our founding agenda: to enable teams of Stanford scholars to work with the public, social, and private sectors to tackle social problems using human creativity, rigorous evidence, and innovative technology.
Our approach allows us to take bold bets on big problems. We make staged and sequenced investments to catalyze impact labs at different phases in generating new evidence and practical, scalable solutions. We prioritize investments that can improve the lives of historically oppressed or marginalized communities.
While organizations like the National Institutes for Health provide substantial funding for STEM research, there has been comparatively little federal or private support to advance social science research for the benefit of society. SIL is changing that, and in the process, modeling how the social sciences can help discover and scale solutions to complex societal problems.
When we invest, we expect to see a return–not in money, but in outcomes that improve people’s lives. While not every investment will be successful, those that do yield breakthroughs will have an outsized impact on really challenging problems.
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