Training innovation policymakers to adopt more experimentation
Discover how the training programme delivered by IGL helped EURADA agencies to become more experimental.
Discover how the training programme delivered by IGL helped EURADA agencies to become more experimental.
What's next in Business Training? In our latest blog post we chart the course for effective policies and necessary research to further use and generate rigorous evidence in the field.
In our previous blog post, we were talking to Doug Scott, Chair of Cavendish Enterprise, about what he learned from leading a randomised trial of the Business Boost scheme, carried out under the UK Government’s Business Basics Programme. In this post, we continue our conversation with Doug, this time focusing on how funders can best manage experimentation funds and ensure that they produce learning that leads to better policy decisions.
In a recent post, we highlighted the findings from the randomised trial of the Business Boost project, carried out by Cavendish Enterprise in collaboration with the Enterprise Research Centre. Since this was the first randomised trial to be completed under the UK Government’s Business Basics Programme, it was a learning process for the implementers, the evaluators, and for us in the Innovation Growth Lab (IGL). Together with a colleague from the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, we recently chatted with Doug Scott, Chair of Cavendish Enterprise and the instigator of the Business Boost trial, to find out what he had learned during the process.
Policymakers and business support organisations can use a diverse set of tools to create thriving entrepreneurship ecosystems, ranging from financial support, mentoring to business training. But how can they choose the most effective ones? Charlotte Reypens explores.
Christina Ungerer from the IST institute at Constance University of Applied Sciences explores the hidden traps of RCTs after their IGL-funded trial into business coaching.
In this post, we collect insights from the book which we hope will be particularly useful for policymakers designing crisis support for businesses, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular, during this time.
As more and more governments attempt to base their policies on sound evidence, randomised controlled trials - the 'gold standard' in evaluation - are gaining a stronger role in determining which policies work. But are they really the best way to tell us which policies should be used? This blogpost explores how to improve our ability to learn and better design things that work.
Our estimates for the spending on business support across the European Union, based on our research for the UK, indicate that as much as €152 billion were spent in 2014. In this blog, we explore what this means for Europe, and what could be done better.
This blog post outlines how we arrived at the figure of £9.8 billion in UK government spending on business support. Continue reading