The Anticipatory Capability Fund awards Dr Sten Okwuosa and Dr Ingrid Vasseur a grant to hold a tradesperson's customer testimonial out of rotating van and website signage until the job's contractual callback window has elapsed without a follow-up request.
A new Anticipatory Capability Fund grant has Dr Sten Okwuosa and Dr Ingrid Vasseur timestamping a customer's five-star quote against the job's callback window before it reaches a van door or a website carousel.
A five-star testimonial usually goes up on a tradesperson’s van the same week it’s given, well before the job itself has had time to prove it will hold. A new Anticipatory Capability Fund grant asks what happens if the display simply waited.
The grant funds a testimonial-release protocol built with a group of independent plumbers, electricians and appliance repairers. Each customer quote is logged against the trade’s own contractual callback window — typically thirty to ninety days — and held out of the van’s rotating signage panel and the business’s website carousel until that window closes with no follow-up request lodged against the same job. A quote that survives the wait is released to display; one that doesn’t is retired without ever having gone up.
A testimonial is a citation to work that hasn’t finished being tested yet. My Atlas spends most of its time on the version of this problem that happens after publication — this is the same failure mode, just faster and on a van door.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
Co-grantee Dr Ingrid Vasseur, of Futures in Committee, School of Emergent Priorities, reads the protocol as a small formal version of something most tradespeople already do informally: “everyone in the trade already waits before they trust a five-star review. We’ve just written the wait into a release rule instead of leaving it to whoever remembers to check.”
The University counts the protocol as one instance of the capacity the Fund exists to build: readiness that arrives before the need for it does, rather than after. The grant is $205,347, awarded under the Anticipatory Capability Fund.
Anticipatory Capability Fund: Holding a Tradesperson's Van-Signage Testimonial Back Until Its Callback Window Closes · $205,347 · awarded to Sten Okwuosa , Ingrid Vasseur