About
Accelerating Innovation
Threats to the global community — such as climate change and pandemics — demand urgent innovation and action at scale. But when commercial incentives for innovation trail behind the social value, market shaping instruments are required to credibly signal demand and spur and scale up innovation.
The Market Shaping Accelerator aims to harness the momentum and interest in these tools generated from global successes in vaccine development to accelerate their adoption by governments, multilateral institutions, and philanthropies to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
View the MSA Glossary to learn more about commonly-used terms.
About
Accelerating Innovation

Threats to the global community — such as climate change and pandemics — demand urgent innovation and action at scale. But when commercial incentives for innovation trail behind the social value, market shaping instruments are required to credibly signal demand and spur and scale up innovation.
The Market Shaping Accelerator aims to harness the momentum and interest in these tools generated from global successes in vaccine development to accelerate their adoption by governments, multilateral institutions, and philanthropies to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
View the MSA Glossary to learn more about commonly-used terms.
Our Team
Nobel Laureates, Leading Scholars and Innovators Advance the Use of Market Shaping Instruments to Address Global Challenges
The Market Shaping Accelerator brings together the world’s leading market shaping experts. The team behind the Accelerator has contributed to both foundational research and prominent policy successes of market shaping mechanisms, including the Pneumococcal and Frontier Advance Market Commitments (AMCs).
Faculty Directors

Christopher Snyder

Michael Kremer

Rachel Glennerster
Staff

William Arnesen

Sarrin Chethik

Siddhartha Haria

Satvika Mahajan

Claire McMahon

Leah Rosenzweig
Advisors
Susan Athey
Stanford University
Cath Bremner
Impax Asset Management
Michael Greenstone
University of Chicago
Tom Kalil
Schmidt Futures
Matthew Kotchen
Yale University
Steve Levitt
University of Chicago
Nan Ransohoff
Frontier
Jean Tirole
Toulouse School of Economics; 2014 Nobel Prize Recipient
Heidi Williams
Dartmouth College
Catherine Wolfram
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Innovation Challenge
An open call for ideas to surface high-impact market shaping proposals to address climate change and pandemic preparedness
In its first year the Accelerator will surface challenges well suited to be addressed with market shaping instruments, support the development of viable proposals, attract external funding to move selected proposals into action and finally follow these mechanisms through to completion.
Climate Change
Climate mitigation and adaptation strategies including carbon removal, green steel, clean cooling, and climate-resilient crops pose potential opportunities for market shaping mechanisms to increase commercial incentives for innovation in these areas.
Pandemic Preparedness
Global losses from pandemics are expected to be over $800 billion annually. Promising candidates for market shaping instruments to mitigate these losses include broad spectrum antivirals, a universal coronavirus vaccine, and an intranasal coronavirus vaccine, among others.
Event Recap
Official Launch of the Market Shaping Accelerator
The University of Chicago hosted a special launch event on the evening of May 4, 2023 at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. to learn more about the Market Shaping Accelerator and the $2 million Innovation Challenge. View pictures from the event and watch the video using the button below.
Latest News
Opportunities
Join the Accelerator
We’re hiring full time staff. We are also interested in people with domain expertise in climate change and pandemic preparedness as well as the economics of innovation, industrial organization and costing/pricing. If you are interested in offering your expertise, please reach out: [email protected].

Administration and Operations Associate
The Administration and Operations Associate will support Professor Rachel Glennerster and MSA in administration and operations support towards the goal of incentivizing innovations that address climate change, biosecurity, and other pressing global challenges.