Trials

The Impact of Intellectual Property Protection on Firm Outcomes: Evidence from a Randomised Controlled Trial

To what extent does patent protection change product market outcomes?

The granting of patent rights is a central public policy tool to incentivise innovation, but the incentive that patents offer works indirectly. Rather than directly subsidising R&D costs (as in other mechanisms, such as tax credits), or attempting to make up for any differences between the public and private incentives to research, patents provide incentive through product market protection.

Corporate Nudging & Intrapreneurship

Can subtle non-monetary nudges be used to influence intrapreneurial behaviour in a large corporation?

Intrapreneurship, or bottom-up entrepreneurial activities by employees from existing firms, can be an important source of innovation and organisational growth. Management of intrapreneurship, however, is highly complex as it is typically considered discretionary behaviour and is generally not formalised in job descriptions. Innovation competitions is one way to stimulate this type of behaviour within firms

From our blog

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

New research provides the first experimental evidence distinguishing between two fundamental approaches to entrepreneurial training: developing managerial capital versus entrepreneurial capital.

Wednesday, 23 October 2024

How we helped the EIC unlock new insights through synthetic data collaboration

Monday, 14 October 2024

IGL has launched a new Data Science and Technology Unit. Find out what it will do for a vision of data powered policy and organisations.

Discover our new programme!
We just launched our "Unlocking Innovative Potential: Experimentation" programme.
Learn about how organisations are becoming more experimental
Despite the importance of innovation and high-growth entrepreneurship for economic growth, there is still little evidence on how best to create impactful support. We believe that we need a more experimental approach to innovation and growth policy, trialling new instruments but also evaluating them more rigorously. Browse our Trials Database to see what organisations are learning from experimentation!

Our Partners

The Innovation Growth Lab is an international initiative led by Nesta in partnership with several public and private organisations around the world.

Our research network

The IGL Research Network includes over 100 researchers from around the world working on randomised controlled trials related to innovation, high-growth entrepreneurship and growth.

Richard Kneller
University of Nottingham
Charlie Ebert
Colorado State University
Rosa Grimaldi
University of Bologna
Diether Beuermann
Inter-American Development Bank
Nathan Fiala
Innovations for Poverty Action
Prof Dr. Reinhilde Veugelers
KU Leuven
Li-Wei Chen
Old Dominion University
Caroline Fry
MIT
Dean Karlan
Northwestern University
Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe
University of Oslo
Sheen S. Levine
University of Texas
Patrick Gaule
CERGE-EI
Jhony Pulido
CAF Development Bank
David Pérez-Castrillo
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Viktoria Boss
TUHH Institute of Entrepreneurship
Guido Buenstorf
University of Kassel