About IGL

About us

IGL is a global policy lab that helps develop more effective policies to increase innovation and productivity.

We are on a mission to foster productive, sustainable, and inclusive economies through novel policy ideas, experimentation, data and evidence.

We work with policymakers, researchers, practitioners and funders to address key policy challenges in the fields of science, innovation, entrepreneurship and business policies.

We span the boundaries of policy and research. Our IGL Partners include leading institutions that support our mission, and the IGL Research Network has over 150 researchers working on experimental research in this field, including the IGL Scientific Committee members.

We are a non-profit organisation run by a core team based at Nesta and the Barcelona School of Economics.

Our story and impact

IGL launched in 2014 as an initiative within Nesta (the UK’s innovation foundation), in partnership with a core group of governments, foundations and researchers.

Within a short period of time IGL has become the global leader in this nascent field, achieved substantial policy impact across the OECD, and helped advance the experimentation agenda in this policy space.

Some highlights of our impact include:

Supporting over 70 policy experiments in 28 countries, demonstrating the feasibility and value of experimentation in this policy space.
Collaborating with over 50 government agencies worldwide to help them become more experimental, supporting them to set up their first experiments and institutionalise the role of experimentation.
Running capacity-building workshops, events and online resources that have reached thousands of policymakers from over 45 countries.
Successfully campaigning for the creation of experimentation funds, resulting in both the UK and the EU launching dedicated funding calls for experiments in innovation and business policies and programmes. This has supported many organisations to set up and run their first experiments.
Seeding a growing global community of policymakers, practitioners and researchers engaged in policy experimentation in this field, collaborating with over 120 organisations to advance this agenda.