Become a partner

Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) partners are diverse in terms of geographical location and organisational missions.

Some are organisations directly engaged in supporting innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth, with an interest in exploring the adoption of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate their activities or to improve the design and effectiveness of their programmes.

Others are funders interested in building the evidence base and pushing forward the knowledge frontier by increasing the adoption of RCTs in innovation, entrepreneurship and growth research.

However, they all share a common goal: to generate better evidence and improve the programmes and policies that support innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth, contributing to make our economies more innovative and entrepreneurial.

Partnership Models

The two main partnership models available are IGL partner and IGL grants funding partner.

Why become an IGL partner?

  • You join a global network of like-minded organisations and researchers, opening up possibilities for joint projects, peer learning, and exchange of knowledge and best practices through our range of activities.
  • You can steer the overall direction and priorities of the initiative towards some of the challenges that your organisation faces.
  • You get access to the expert support to:
    • Help scope, design and run RCTs in your organisation.
    • Contribute to capability building within your organisation.
    • Develop best practice on how to run RCTs in this domain.
    • Identify potential research partners to work on your trials.
  • Ultimately, you contribute to build the global evidence base on the most effective approaches to deliver your mission, learning from the trials within your organisation but also benefiting from the lessons in all trials conducted elsewhere.

Why become an IGL Grants funding partner?

  • Contribute to push forward the knowledge frontier by funding high-impact research that builds the evidence base on different approaches to support innovation, entrepreneurship and growth as well as on the underlying drivers and barriers.
  • Encourage more researchers to get into this space and answer the questions most relevant to your organisation priorities.
  • Incentivise organisations supporting innovation, entrepreneurship and growth to use more experimental approaches, improving their evaluations and the effectiveness of their programmes.  
  • Take advantage of this bottom-up approach to identify new promising support schemes around the world and make it easier for them to scale up.
  • Leveraging resources into a joint call:
    • Gives it sufficient scale to reach more researchers and organisations around the world.
    • Enables cross pollination of ideas and lessons across different projects.
    • Increases the number of ideas received.
    • Maximises its impact.
    • Reduces the overall costs and burden of running the programme (from dissemination of the call to the selection process to the administration of the grants).
  • Maintain full control on how your funding contribution is used:
    • Funding commitments can be conditional on trials tackling a particular theme or undertaken in a particular geography.
    • No obligation to fund any project if the proposals received do not meet your expectations.
    • You participate in the review process and can always choose to opt-in or opt-out from funding a project.

There is some flexibility around these partnership models, including a mixed model in which IGL partners also contribute to co-fund the IGL Grants Programme.

If you are interested in receiving more information about the different partnership opportunities, please do not hesitate to contact us.