Blog

Read the latest blogs from the IGL network.

Unpicking the productivity puzzle – What have we learnt from the UK’s Business Basics Programme?

By James Phipps & Rob Fuller on Wednesday, 28 February 2024.

The question of how to raise productivity among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has long presented a challenge to policymakers around the world. In 2018, the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) worked with Innovate UK and IGL to launch an innovative approach to this problem, creating a fund to experiment with interventions to boost productivity among SMEs.

People want governments to involve them in solving society’s biggest challenges - this is how to do it

By Peter Baeck on Tuesday, 6 February 2024.

Through our work with the European Commission to promote policy experimentation and ensure citizens’ engagement in the EU five societal missions, we gathered insights from a survey of 4600 people from six EU Countries about their motivations and attitudes to citizen engagement. This blog outlines some of the key insights from the survey.

Experimentation is more popular than you might think

By Rob Fuller on Wednesday, 24 January 2024.

In IGL we’re firmly convinced that there are major benefits to experimentation in public policy, to find out what works and to make programmes work better before they are launched at scale. But it has never been clear how much our enthusiasm for experiments is shared among the wider public. We recently had the opportunity to look into this, and found that the public have a much better understanding of the need for experimentation than we’d realised.

Image by Stefanie Schmid Rincon

IGL year in review

By The IGL team on Wednesday, 20 December 2023.

2023 saw IGL kick off exciting new partnerships and projects, deepen relationships with longstanding collaborators, and break new ground both in how we work and our thematic areas of focus. This blog shares highlights of our year, and looks ahead to what’s on our radar for 2024.

Driving Strategic Data-Driven Experimentation with the European Innovation Council

By Sara Garcia Arteagoitia and David Ampudia on Friday, 15 December 2023.

Learn more about our project in partnership with the European Innovation Council to provide research and evidence-based advice on data-driven, experimental, and collaborative public sector innovation processes to support the development of the EIC’s strategic intelligence.

The future is now: Citizen participation in R&I

By Nyangala Zolho on Monday, 27 November 2023.

This blog shares insights gathered from the three-day conference ‘Connect. Collaborate. Create.’, held in Paris from 19-21 October 2023, where the Innovation Growth Lab co-hosted a futures-oriented workshop aimed at identifying what decisions might need to be made today, in order to ensure the deepening of the participative pockets of R&I that exist today.

Can we rely on retrospective data?

By Rob Fuller on Monday, 18 September 2023.

If we need to evaluate a programme for which no baseline data is available, can we fall back on asking survey respondents to recall their situation from a notional baseline? Rob Fuller, IGL's Evaluation Manager, discusses recent work suggesting that this approach may not just be inaccurate but actively misleading.

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