Washington, DC – January 6, 2026 — The Market Shaping Accelerator (MSA) today announced a new institutional home and an expanded set of partners. MSA is now a collaboration between the University of Chicago, the Center for Global Development (CGD), and Dartmouth, and is newly housed at CGD’s headquarters in Washington, DC. The move positions MSA closer to decision-makers in governments, multilaterals, and philanthropies and strengthens its ability to translate research into policy and practice.
MSA’s mission is to advance the use of pull mechanisms—including tools such as advance market commitments and prizes—to accelerate innovations with high social value. In this next phase, MSA will focus on supporting partners to design and implement pull incentives to accelerate the innovation and scaling of new diagnostics for neonatal sepsis, repurpose generic drugs, and invent a vaccine to reduce enteric methane.
“The Market Shaping Accelerator applies rigorous economic theory to understand how innovation can best be employed to solve urgent, real-world problems,” said Christopher Snyder, Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth and faculty co-director of MSA. “By joining forces with CGD and the University of Chicago, we can move faster from abstract models to workable policies to executed deals—whether that’s an AMC for a low-cost diagnostic for neonatal sepsis or an incentive for discovering repurposed uses for generic drugs. This new phase is about moving ideas for market shaping off the paper and into practice.”
As part of this transition, MSA has launched a new website that will host a growing suite of resources for policymakers and funders, starting with the Pull Incentive Sizing Tool, which offers a structured way to think about how large a pull incentive needs to be. In the coming year, MSA will also release an Atlas of Innovation, developed with the Institute for Progress, to help decision-makers assess which funding mechanism—research grant, innovation prize, advance market commitment, etc.—is best suited to the problems they aim to solve.
“This new phase for MSA is about helping policymakers and funders move from asking whether market shaping could help to actually getting actual pull incentives in place,” said Leah Rosenzweig, CGD Senior Fellow and director of the Market Shaping Accelerator. “By bringing together the analytical strengths of the University of Chicago and Dartmouth with CGD’s policy reach, we’re in a strong position to design incentives that are both technically sound and politically feasible.”
MSA invites policymakers, funders, researchers, and practitioners to explore its tools and engage with its work from its new base at CGD. Email us at marketshapingaccelerator@cgdev.org.