K2 completes first Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of Bath

The project involved researching behavioural interventions to encourage more sustainable choices within the global mobility industry’s value chain.

BATH, UNITED KINGDOM, February 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Back in 2023, a 25-month project was undertaken to research behavioural interventions and encourage more sustainable choices within the global mobility industry’s value chain. The project was part of K2’s sustainability programme, and its ongoing industry-academia partnership with the University of Bath and jointly funded by Innovate UK. K2 welcomed Project Lead Khushi, Research Associate from the University of Bath to their Global ESG & Compliance Team. Khushi, a behavioural scientist with an MSc in Behavioural Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, embedded herself within K2, whilst maintaining a strong link to the University of Bath. The project steering group was a multidisciplinary team bringing together academic researchers Prof Brian Squire and Dr Iina Ikonen (University of Bath) with senior industry leaders at K2, including Linda Rafferty, Global Head of ESG and Compliance, and Phil Hunt, Board Member, Managing Director of K2 Americas, and Head of Supply Chain.

The project aimed to improve engagement with sustainability initiatives across K2’s supply chain, by researching how best to encourage service providers/partners to commit to sustainability reporting and utilise a new digital ‘Partner Platform’. Through structured, mixed-method research, behavioural insights were developed and directly embedded into K2’s partner communications. The project’s results demonstrated that small, low-cost changes to messaging can significantly increase partner engagement- by 85% – and accelerate response times. Importantly, these outcomes were achieved without financial incentives, structural redesign, or policy enforcement; thus, demonstrating the power of behaviourally informed communication in complex B2B environments.

Alongside measurable behavioural impact, the project created a lasting behavioural science capability within K2, strengthened the company’s sustainability positioning, and generated peer-reviewed academic outputs which Khushi presented at international conferences.
The project was divided into three phases:
• Phase 1: Diagnostics and mapping (2023-2024)
• Phase 2: Cross-cultural online experiments (2024-2025)
• Phase 3: A real-world field experiment (2025)

Phase 1:
Phase 1 identified where behavioural interventions would be:
A) Most impactful for sustainability
B) Most feasible operationally
C) Least likely to undermine commercial viability

The diagnostics highlighted a strong commitment to sustainability among clients, alongside an opportunity for partners to support this ambition through clearer guidance, benchmarks, and leadership. This shaped the project’s upstream focus on partner engagement and behaviourally informed communications, helping to make sustainability easier to act on in mobility decisions and supporting positive downstream impacts for clients.

Phase 2:
Phase 2 comprised of two large-scale online experiments conducted with business decision-makers aged 25–65 from the UK, USA, and India. While the first study adopted a cross-cultural, exploratory approach to test a broader set of behavioural framings, the second one built on these insights through a more focused, confirmatory design aimed at refining mechanisms and validating effects.

The experiments concluded that message effectiveness depends on individual-level cultural values, rather than geography alone. In practice, this means a strategy that performs strongly in one cultural context may underperform, or even backfire, in another. Additionally, persuasiveness emerged as a key mediator between message framing and behavioural intention. Together, these studies provided a robust theoretical justification for selecting urgency and loss-based framing for real-world testing.

In parallel with the experiments, behavioural insights were applied to drive uptake of supply-chain compliance training program aligned with K2’s Kinetic Code of Conduct for partners. This work reinforced governance standards across the value chain and aligned with the project’s wider objectives of increasing meaningful engagement with supply-chain partners. As Scope 3 emissions sit largely within the supply chain, sustained progress towards K2’s Science Based Targets (SBTi) depends on meaningful partner engagement.

Phase 3:
Phase 3’s real-world field experiment involved embedding behavioural interventions directly into partner communications through HubSpot which supported the rollout of K2’s ‘Partner Platform’. This sample included 625 partner contacts that were randomised across four conditions:
• Control: A neutral, informational message presenting the opportunity without behavioural framing.
• Loss Framing: A message highlighting what partners could miss or lose by not engaging, making inaction more salient.
• Urgency-Exclusivity: A message creating a sense of time-limited access and priority participation to prompt faster action.
• Messenger Effect: A message endorsed by senior leadership to leverage perceived authority and credibility.

Urgency-exclusivity generated the highest engagement across all funnel stages, with registration rates nearly doubling compared to the control condition. Loss framing also outperformed neutral messaging.
The field experiment provided clear, causal evidence that behaviourally informed messaging substantially improves engagement in a B2B sustainability context, leveraging only low-cost changes to language and framing.

The research gained international visibility through major academic conferences, including the World Conference on Psychology and Behavioural Science, the International Behavioural Public Policy Conference, and Behave 2025 the European Conference on Behaviour and Energy Efficiency, alongside industry roundtables and strategic dissemination. By applying cross-cultural behavioural research to sustainability challenges within a global mobility supply chain, this project establishes a first-of-its-kind evidence base for the industry.

Tools and training developed during the project are now embedded across K2 Corporate Mobility, and the findings demonstrate to the wider industry that behavioural interventions can unlock sustainability engagement even in complex, commercially sensitive B2B environments. K2 are also very pleased to have welcomed Khushi on board permanently, as their Sustainability Research and Behavioural Insights Associate.

Khushi
K2 Corporate Mobility
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