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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Lessons on designing tech RCTs with SMEs
Wednesday, 12 January 2022

How can we help small and medium-sized businesses improve their productivity? New technologies based on artificial intelligence - such as chatbots and marketing automation - seem to offer clear benefits but are not yet widely adopted by SMEs. Alongside the Greater London Authority, Capital Enterprise and CognitionX, we designed a randomised trial to investigate how to encourage SMEs in London's retail and hospitality sectors to adopt the use of these technologies.

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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!
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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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