Our client: London School of Economics (LSE) / Impact U
Duration: 2 months
Final beneficiaries: UK universities and their students and academics developing social ventures
The situation:
Impact U brings together UK universities led by LSE to provide training and funding to support pre-seed social ventures founded by academics and students. As they prepared to launch their programme hub, the ImpactU team wanted to understand what support would be most beneficial to university students and academics starting social ventures (their users), while learning from what has worked well (or not) from those working in similar programmes (other experts).
Our solution:
We conducted qualitative discovery research with both users and experts to identify key themes and share high-level recommendations:
- Scoping and light evidence review to get up to speed with what documentation and evidence already exists, including review of survey results from university partners
- Research interviews with:
- People running related programmes (experts) to deep dive into their experience of what works and why, both in terms of content and approach
- Existing and aspiring social venture spin outs from universities (users), to understand what support they’ve needed, what support they’ve received, what worked, what was missing, and anything else they would recommend
- Synthesis and analysis of themes, structure, learning objectives and enablers
The result:
A comprehensive User Research Summary based on the 14 interviews (8 users, 6 experts) and research we did, representing 12 organisations and 15 venture support programmes, which provided overarching principles to consider in developing the ImpactU programme; user insights across motivation, content and training topics, connections and community, wrap around support, flexibility and format of the programme; and future ideas to consider for Impact U.
This enabled the Impact U Hub Manager to prepare for the timely launch of the programme.
“The User Research that The Impact Collective delivered has been insightful and valuable. It has allowed us to validate some original assumptions and anecdotal themes with their robust primary research. It has also provided us with areas and topics we had yet to explore. This has allowed us to improve our product requirements for the Impact U Social Venture Hub, meaning that we are in a more favourable position to deliver a product that meets the needs of users and provides them with value.” – Blué O’Connor, Social Venture Hub Manager
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