What University of Chicago Market Shaping Accelerator does
The University of Chicago Market Shaping Accelerator (MSA) is an academic initiative focused on “market shaping” mechanisms—policy and incentive designs that make innovation financially viable when purely commercial incentives lag social value—applied to challenges such as pandemics and climate change. MSA’s core role is to translate market-shaping research and prior real-world examples (e.g., advance market commitments used in vaccine development) into proposals that governments, multilateral institutions, and philanthropies can adopt, typically by designing “pull” incentives (prizes, milestone contracts, and advance market commitments) rather than funding only upstream R&D. The organization is led by a small set of faculty directors from the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College, plus a director role held by Leah Rosenzweig at the Center for Global Development, and it runs an Innovation Challenge to identify, develop, and advance market-shaping proposals. Strategically, MSA positions itself as a connector between academic incentive design, domain expertise (health and climate), and funder/policymaker implementation pathways—aiming to help move from concept to contracts and (eventually) scaled deployment.