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

The future is now: Citizen participation in R&I
Monday, 27 November 2023

This blog shares insights gathered from the three-day conference ‘Connect. Collaborate. Create.’, held in Paris from 19-21 October 2023, where the Innovation Growth Lab co-hosted a futures-oriented workshop aimed at identifying what decisions might need to be made today, in order to ensure the deepening of the participative pockets of R&I that exist today.

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Building a taxonomy of innovation
Thursday, 26 October 2023

An overview of our approach to build, validate and label a five-level taxonomy of research topics in the UK, along with instructions to download and use

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Can we rely on retrospective data?
Monday, 18 September 2023

If we need to evaluate a programme for which no baseline data is available, can we fall back on asking survey respondents to recall their situation from a notional baseline? Rob Fuller, IGL's Evaluation Manager, discusses recent work suggesting that this approach may not just be inaccurate but actively misleading.

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IGL is launching a training programme!
Training programme: Driving policy impact through experimentation
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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 controlled trials related to innovation, high-growth entrepreneurship and growth.

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  • Dietmar Harhoff
    Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition
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  • Christoph Ihl
    Hamburg University of Technology
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  • Inés Macho-Stadler
    Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
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  • Christina Ungerer
    Constance University of Applied Sciences IST Institute for Strategic Innovation & Technology Management
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