Report: The state of behavioural research in UK ventures and what comes next

At Zinc, our mission is to make the UK the top destination to successfully start a high-impact health or environment venture. We believe that behavioural research —the systematic study of human behaviour and how to change it—is a key tool with which ventures can enhance their impact. However, there is little visibility of how behavioural research is currently used in UK ventures, as well as the associated challenges.

We joined the Behavioural Research UK (BR-UK) consortium to shed light on the role of behavioural research in ventures and identify opportunities to enable its use. This blog is the first in a three-part series exploring our findings and will provide a snapshot of the current landscape (Want all the details now? You can find the full report here).

What is “behavioural research” anyway?

If you’re asking, you’re not alone! For this research, we defined behavioural research as research that aims to understand what influences, characterises, changes or results from people’s individual or collective behaviour – particularly that draws upon theories, frameworks, and existing evidence from the behavioural science literature. This allowed us to differentiate behavioural research from other research conducted in ventures (e.g. user research, market research). However, the behavioural researchers we interviewed tended to define it much more broadly around understanding/investigating behaviour, what contributes to it, and how it can be changed. They often blended this research with other related disciplines like user research. 

We therefore believe that in order to support behavioural research capability in ventures, we may benefit from supporting their research capability more broadly. This is compounded when examining the roles behavioural researchers in ventures undertake and how they identify.

What does a “behavioural researcher” look like? 

Dedicated behavioural research roles are rare. Most researchers juggle multiple responsibilities across various functions. We found behavioural research typically falls to individuals in leadership, design/UX, product, technology, and IT teams. These professionals often wear many hats—conducting user research, managing projects, or analyzing data—leaving behavioural research as just one piece of the puzzle.

In particular, we found that:

• Only 16% of participants in our survey for behavioural researchers and users had a job title explicitly tied to behaviour.
• Most researchers (70%) spent only 1-2 weeks per month on behavioural research projects.

For ventures, this means building behavioural research capacity requires either supporting multitasking professionals or outsourcing some of the work.

Where are these researchers working? 

Behavioural research spans a wide range of sectors, stages, and company sizes. 

• Top industries and focus areas: In our survey, behavioural researchers and users were mostly working in healthcare (33%), education (19%), climate (13%), finance (10%) and many participants were working in ventures trying to tackle societal issues in health and social care, mental health, climate change, and environmental sustainability.
• Product types: Software-as-a-service (42%) leads the pack, followed by AI/machine learning (33%) and generative AI (17%).

Behavioural researchers often work in small teams in ventures, with less than 10 people actively working on behavioural research projects in 88% of ventures surveyed. This is unsurprising as it is unlikely that small companies with limited runway would have more people allocated to any task. However, the behavioural research findings do influence a larger quantity of stakeholders in ventures (38% of ventures with behavioural researchers had 10 or more people drawing on behavioural research). 

Where are the goals and how is success measured?

Behavioural researchers are often driven to actually cause behavioural change in end users, whether it’s promoting exercise behaviours, environmentally friendly behaviours, or improving cybersecurity habits. This ambition can be motivated both by internal drivers like the desire to have an impact or external drivers (e.g. regulation, desire to stand out from competitors).  

The drive to cause behavioural change also often comes with a desire and need to measure behavioural change directly (e.g. change in cycling behaviours, spending habits). However this can be challenging in ventures if there is a lack of stakeholder interest in testing effectiveness, if there isn’t a large enough user base to conduct experiments, if there is a lack of access to the right tools or data to measure behaviours beyond products, or a need to prioritise other tasks. With all of these factors and competing priorities, it is unsurprising that at times, behavioural researchers measure their success based on whether others in their venture acknowledge and act on their research, which is not always a given. 

In addition to delivering on behavioural change and associated impacts (e.g. on health outcomes), researchers are also tasked with delivering on commercial metrics (e.g. engagement with a product, net promoter scores), which can be a difficult balancing act, but often necessary for behavioural researchers in ventures.

Takeaways

Behavioural research in ventures contributes both to solving societal issues and to commercial metrics, but not without challenges. Researchers are often juggling multiple responsibilities, balancing their behavioural research work with other pressing tasks. To support and grow this capability, we need solutions that are realistic about these pressures and encourage collaboration and smarter resource use. In our next blogs, we will do a deeper dive on the resources and tools behavioural researchers use to make their work more impactful, as well as the challenges and solutions to building capability.