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

Thursday, 27 June 2024

The Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) is delighted to announce the launch of the Unlocking Innovative Potential: Experimentation Programme. This one-year project, funded by UK Research and Innovation, supports the efforts to expand and diversify the UK R&D workforce by enabling a step change in how interventions are evaluated and optimised.

Wednesday, 24 April 2024

Have you ever sent out a survey to businesses and heard… nothing? You're not alone. In this blog, we've summarised what we've learned over the course of supporting dozens of trials that have involved collecting survey data from small businesses.

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.

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.

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  • Santosh Kesavan
    Crosslinks Foundation
  • Emanuele Colonnelli
    University of Chicago Booth School of Business
  • David Pérez-Castrillo
    Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
  • Albina Khairullina
    École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne