Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale

ABOUT THE YALE RESEARCH INITIATIVE ON INNOVATION AND SCALE (Y-RISE)

Given the extent of poverty throughout the world, effectively addressing it will require large-scale changes to markets and policies. Governments and NGOs are rising to this challenge, taking evidence based policies to ambitious new scales. However, a gap exists between that ambition and the existing evidence; increasing the scale of an antipoverty intervention can change how it works, and only recently have social scientists begun to grapple with the complexities of scaling up interventions and applying them in new contexts.

With this newly-created research initiative at Yale University, our goal is to develop the science behind scaling up effective interventions, define that emerging research agenda, and scale-up a few promising interventions in the process. To that end, Y-RISE will build research networks, host academic network meetings and conferences, connect researchers to implementing partners, and make seed grants to develop new research. Y-RISE research will have direct policy implications, advancing efforts to bring the most good to the most people, so we publicize and advocate the policy lessons from our research.