Working to increase the impact of innovation and growth policy
About us
IGL supports the development of productive, sustainable and inclusive economies through the application of new policy ideas, data and rigorous evidence.
We collaborate with policymakers, researchers, practitioners and funders to experiment and address key policy challenges in the areas of science, innovation, entrepreneurship and business.
To advance our mission, IGL brings together a network of leading government bodies and foundations who share our vision – the IGL Partners.
Our work can be divided in two broad policy areas:
Within these, we have different working streams which can be divided in “What we do” and “Thematic programmes”
Our story and impact
IGL launched in 2014 as an initiative within Nesta (the UK’s innovation agency for social good), in partnership with a core group of governments, foundations and researchers. Within a short period of time we successfully positioned IGL as 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 35 government agencies across five continents to help them become more experimental.
- Running capacity building workshops, events and online resources that have reached thousands of policymakers from close to 50 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.