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How BIX works

The Behavioural Insights Exchange (BIX) was created in 2019 in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences and UCL Enterprise to promote collaboration with industry and inspire innovation.

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BIX connects Masters' students with industry partners to conduct behavioural science projects in real-world settings. Projects can be hosted in the private, public and charity sectors with supplemental academic support. This creates novel partnerships that provide significant knowledge exchange opportunities, both in terms of sharing our expertise and through feedback from our partners on the key challenges they face.

The BIX project would count as the mandatory research component of a Master’s programme, which constitutes one third of the final programme grade.

How it works

  • Industry partners complete the Project Proposal Form with an initial idea and send this to Pia Horbacki.
  • We accept new proposals for our Master’s students until the end of August. Students are allocated to projects around November.
  • Students apply for the projects and we match students with relevant interests and skill sets to a project.
  • Industry partners assign an internal mentor to oversee the supervision of the project. 
  • The BIX team identify a UCL academic within the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences to provide supplementary supervision. 
  • How and when a student works on the project is flexible and will be mutually agreed with the company mentor, student and academic supervisor. 
  • Industry partners receive a short presentation or a 2-3 page executive report at the end of the BIX project. 

Fees

BIX projects are cost effective with minimal financial obligations relative to the return values.  
This is split into 2 parts:

1. Research fee - Industry partners pay £1000 research fee per project used by the student to cover research expenses i.e. paying participants for testing.

2. Project admin fee - Industry partners pay £1500. If you offer more than one project in one academic year, you will only pay the project admin fee once. If you offer a project in another academic year, this fee will apply again. 

In summary: 

  • Running one project would cost £2500 (plus VAT)  
  • Running two projects would cost £3500 (plus VAT)

The fees are significantly less than hiring a new employee or a project-based consultant, enabling organisations to explore partnership opportunities and/or get answers to specific questions without advanced budget planning.  Access to cutting-edge scientific knowledge and highly skilled data analysis at these rates is not typically available to the private, public or charity sectors.  

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