BIT launches BI Ventures

BI Ventures is led by BIT’s managing director, Owain Service, and head of ventures, Charlotte Bearn.

BI Ventures has introduced two products so far – Applied and Predictiv – and is looking to add three more in the coming year. Applied is a recruitment platform to help organisations remove behavioural biases from their hiring decisions. Studies have shown, for example, how hiring managers are affected by the names of applicants with names that implicitly suggest certain races, less likely to get an interview.

Service said: “We built Applied because we realised that it was difficult for most HR functions, even in big organisations, to keep up with the latest behavioural research on how to hire the best people. Even if you do know the research, the latest studies show that it’s hard to apply these lessons in practice without implicit biases creeping in.”

Some organisations already using Applied are the UK and Australian governments, Penguin Random House and Cancer Research.

Meanwhile Predictiv helps organisations make better and faster evidence-based decisions with short online randomised controlled trials. Predictiv is designed to help non behavioural scientists run an online RCT from start to finish.