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

Is innovation slowing down? If so, what can be done about it?
Friday, 10 May 2019

We suggest three main areas of action which should be explored by those managing R&D and innovation budgets in order to increase their impact.

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What are we learning from policy experiments to increase innovation and entrepreneurship?
Friday, 25 May 2018

Over the last four years at the Innovation Growth Lab, we've started learning valuable lessons from experiments about how to best support innovation, entrepreneurship, and business growth.

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“Act Fast and Do Whatever It Takes”: Leading economists’ recommendations for business support during COVID-19
Tuesday, 24 March 2020

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.

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Experimental innovation and growth policy
Despite the importance of innovation and high-growth entrepeneurship for economic growth, there is still too little evidence on how best to support them. We believe that we need a more experimental approach to innovation and growth policy, trialling new instruments but also evaluating them more rigorously.
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Our partners

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 85 researchers from around the world working on randomised trials related to innovation, high-growth entrepreneurship and growth.

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  • Caroline Fry
    MIT
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  • Chuck Eesley
    Stanford University
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  • Jaideep Prabhu
    University of Cambridge Judge Business School
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  • Christina Ungerer
    Constance University of Applied Sciences IST Institute for Strategic Innovation & Technology Management
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  • Martina Vojtkova
    NatCen Social Research
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  • Saurabh Lall
    University of Oregon, School of Planning Public Policy and Management
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  • Chaning Jang
    Busara Center for Behavioral Economics
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  • David Pérez-Castrillo
    Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
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