Thrive names Dr Daniel Fujiwara as Head of Economics

Thrive has appointed Dr Daniel Fujiwara as Head of Economics, creating its first dedicated economics leadership role.

The appointment coincides with the launch of an in-house Economics Team, which will work on Thrive's Impact Evaluation Standard, the framework it uses to measure social impact. The team will also support clients seeking a more detailed analysis of social value and well-being outcomes.

Dr Fujiwara is known for his work in social value economics and well-being valuation. He co-authored HM Treasury guidance on well-being and wrote valuation chapters for the Green Book, which the UK Government uses to appraise policies and projects.

He also founded Simetrica, a research consultancy focused on social value, which later became part of Simetrica-Jacobs. His experience will help guide the next stage of development for Thrive's measurement framework.

The hire reflects growing pressure on companies and public bodies to produce social impact data that can withstand closer scrutiny. Boards, investors and contracting authorities are demanding measurements that more closely align with financial reporting standards, particularly as environmental, social and governance reporting evolves.

At Thrive, that demand is shaping both product and advisory work. The Economics Team will focus on well-being valuation, distributional impact analysis, and methods applicable across international markets.

According to Thrive, the Impact Evaluation Standard is already aligned with the Green Book and the UK Government's Social Value Model. Future updates aim to expand its use beyond the UK while sharpening the assessment of social interventions' effects on well-being.

That work also underpins a broader expansion of Thrive's consultancy offering. Alongside the new team, the company is adding an economics advisory service covering valuation, methodology design and the evidence used to support social impact claims.

Thrive's clients span construction, real estate, technology, professional services and the public sector. It positions its work around linking social impact data to decision-making, particularly where organisations need evidence that can withstand internal governance and assurance processes.

Neil MacDonald, Thrive's Chief Executive Officer, linked the move to changing expectations in boardrooms and investment committees.

"Social impact is maturing. Boards and investors want the same rigour from social data that they expect from financial accounts. They need numbers that can support investment decisions, not just stories that read well in a report. The Impact Evaluation Standard already sets the methodological pace in this market, and Daniel's appointment further deepens the economic expertise behind it. His role is to keep pushing that pace," MacDonald said.

The Economics Team will support both consultancy and assurance work as organisations seek more defensible ways to measure social outcomes. In practice, that means closer attention to how outcomes are valued, how benefits are distributed and how evidence is tested.

Rising scrutiny

Social value has become a more prominent part of procurement, investment and reporting decisions in recent years, especially where organisations need to demonstrate broader public benefit. Yet methods for quantifying those outcomes remain contested, with debate over consistency, comparability and the quality of underlying assumptions.

Well-being valuation has emerged as one of the better-known approaches in that debate. It seeks to estimate the value of social outcomes by examining their relationship to life satisfaction and other measures of well-being, rather than relying solely on market prices or direct financial proxies.

Dr Fujiwara's academic and policy work has been closely associated with that field, as well as with distributional weighting and econometric methods for assessing who benefits from interventions and by how much. Those questions are becoming more important as companies are asked not only to show impact but also to explain how that impact is shared across different groups.

For Thrive, bringing that expertise in-house marks a shift from operating mainly as a measurement platform to offering more direct economic analysis and technical advice. The team will contribute to successive updates of the Impact Evaluation Standard, which is overseen independently by a steering committee of academics, economists and sector specialists.

Dr Fujiwara said the sector needed to strengthen its methods and improve how outcomes are captured.

"Social value measurement is ready to raise the bar on rigour, and on how clearly it captures the wellbeing outcomes that interventions actually deliver. Building on the Green Book methodology and rigorous statistical analysis is where the discipline needs to go, and the Impact Evaluation Standard is the right vehicle to take that work to scale," Fujiwara said.