Bigger Tent, Sharper Focus: SIL Launches New Investment Strategy

Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) was founded on a conviction: that rigorous social science, developed in partnership with decision-makers and affected communities, can be a powerful tool for driving lasting change. Seven years in, that conviction is unchanged. But the strategy we use to pursue it has been updated. We're launching that new strategy today, in the form of three big shifts.

We're broadening the scope of our investments to include more researchers whose work can drive impact and widening our definition of partnership to embrace more diverse paths to scale. We’re also sharpening our focus on what SIL is uniquely positioned to support: best-in-class social science.

Shift 1: Best-Fit Partnership & Engagement

Partnership-based research is central to our mission and vision. Yet, over the years we have learned that there are many ways researchers can engage beyond the university to drive research with impact, not all of which fit within SIL’s traditional model. 

The canonical SIL-funded research project has historically involved deep, extended collaboration with one partner or a small number of partners who often participate in the design, execution, and scaling of the work.

Many outstanding research projects fit this mold, and we will continue to support them. But there are many other projects that do not, despite involving genuine engagement and yielding large-scale impact. A research team might work with a network of many partners—like the hundreds of schools using the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR)—but not partner deeply with any single one. Another team might find that what makes sense for their project is engagement with policymakers and other stakeholders but not co-design or deep partnership in the execution phase. For example, engagement with central banks and legislatures has been a key input into the work of the Global Capital Allocation Project (GCAP), but for the integrity of the work, it has been essential that the research itself remain independent.

We’ve seen how these and many other forms of engagement can drive change. Starting today, our updated funding opportunities embrace all of them. We encourage researchers to find the form of engagement or partnership that best serves their research and its path to impact. We have also opened Track 1 funding to researchers in the early stages of exploring the right form of engagement or partnership.

Shift 2: Multiple Paths to Impact

To date, SIL has particularly focused on research that designs, tests, and scales specific interventions or technologies that address social problems. A method for making brick kilns in Bangladesh more efficient and digital tools to expand access to justice in America’s largest court system are two examples. 

This kind of solution-design work has tremendous potential, and it will remain a central part of what we support. But there are other, equally vital paths to impact. 

An important example is research that provides knowledge to policymakers and others whose decisions directly impact lives, for example evaluating the welfare effects of migrant worker programs or providing insights to school leaders designing cell phone policies. 

In both of these cases, the researchers are not themselves designing new solutions. Rather, knowledge is the lever. Whether a research insight points toward the best policy, reframes a debate, or helps understand the deep roots of a problem, the best of this work can shift practice across a whole system—sometimes faster and at a wider scale than any single piloted solution. 

Although SIL has always invested in some knowledge-focused work, our rubrics and funding opportunities have primarily focused on solutions-testing. Today that changes. We're explicitly embracing a wider range of research that can improve lives at scale. 

Shift 3: A Focus on Best-in-Class Social Science

The first two shifts serve to broaden the scope of our portfolio. The third tightens our focus on our mission of putting social science to work for society.

We've updated our funding opportunities to make clear that our mission is to support social science, not science broadly. The test we apply to make this determination is two-part: does the research study human behavior, relationships, or social institutions? And does it produce generalizable knowledge that social scientists would recognize as a meaningful contribution to their field? Research meeting either bar qualifies for potential SIL funding; the strongest proposals meet both. 

SIL has always welcomed research from interdisciplinary teams, and we will continue to do so. We welcome work that spans disciplines within social science, as well as work that reaches into computer science, medicine, engineering, or other fields. For an interdisciplinary proposal to be competitive, it will have a social science contribution that is central, not incidental. We encourage faculty crafting interdisciplinary proposals who are not social scientists to consider including collaborators on their teams who are.

What Else Is New

Two additional updates round out our updated investment strategy: 

• We're building in more flexibility: rather than funding only individual projects, we now welcome applications built around impact-focused research agendas. This gives research teams more opportunity to pivot when roadblocks appear without losing sight of long-term goals. 
• We’ve begun offering occasional experimental windows to test new ways of putting social science to use, starting with Social Science, Supercharged: Fast Grants for AI-Enabled Research.

How We Got Here

First, we looked at the evidence. We took a hard look at our own portfolio, scanned what peer funders are doing, reviewed the research on what makes social science consequential, and studied cases where social science genuinely changed systems at scale.

Second, we listened to our community. We invited over 150 faculty to engage with us across ten sessions, alongside our Faculty Advisory Board, Investment Advisory Council, and other key stakeholders. The message that came through most consistently: broaden eligibility for research funding, but don't blur the mission.

Third, we're putting this strategy to the test. SIL funds researchers who test hypotheses and update their approach as they learn what works and what doesn’t. We hold our own strategy to the same standard. We've learned and adapted before, and we expect to keep doing so as we see how faculty and research teams respond.

Learn More

Our funding opportunities are now live. Applications open on September 8 and are due in October and December.

If you’re doing impact-focused social science research, but have seen yourself outside SIL's tent in the past, we want to hear from you. If you've applied before and were not successful, it may be worth a second look at our refreshed RFPs. If you'd like to talk about whether your research is a good match for one of our funding opportunities, we're offering information sessions and office hours.