Read the latest blogs from the IGL network.
By now you should have gathered that at IGL we believe innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth policy would benefit from being more experimental. It will also therefore not be a surprise that this is a common theme at IGL conferences, with sessions each year showcasing policy relevant experiments and workshops that build awareness and knowledge of experimental approaches.
New ideas in innovation policymaking often seek to improve the process of discovering and measuring innovation, as well as challenge our understanding of the comparative benefits of existing approaches for the economy and society. IGL2019 speakers offered an important additional thread, sharing insights on how innovation agencies could spot, develop and support the people behind the policymaking process.
During the Policy and Practice Learning Lab at IGL2019 in Berlin, we hosted a range of workshops and interactive sessions to give policymakers the opportunity to put their learning into action. Henry Sauermann, Associate Professor of Strategy at EMST Berlin, joined a panel to discuss how we understand scientists’ and researchers’ motives to improve research productivity, collboaration, commercialisation and impact.
At IGL2019 we explored agile innovation policy - what is it, why is it important, and how do we get governments to adopt it in their policymaking strategies? Marieke gives an overview of this year's conference's opening session in Berlin.
The emergence of new technological capabilities, whether in the form of Artificial Intelligence enabled autonomous vehicles or new ways of delivering services, offer important benefits for the economy and society. But their novelty can pose a problem. How will these innovations function in the real world? How can we employ these new ideas to maximize the benefits and mitigate potential harms? What other structures, physical, organisational or social, will we need to put in place for them to work?
At IGL2018, we were compelled to reckon with a large and persistent gender gap in innovation - and so this year, we asked experts how we could close the gap. Sofia Bapna from the Carlson School of Management and Rembrand Koning from the Harvard Business School presented some answers based on their latest research at the IGL2019 Research Meeting in Berlin.
What happens when you compel people to innovate — do you end up with better or worse ideas? And how is crowdfunding shifting the power paradigm for women? We're launching our new magazine to begin to answer some of these questions.
Guest blogger Eszter Czibor provides part two of the mentoring blog series, discussing the practical issues and design details of such programmes, drawing on examples of past trials and related initiatives, and the IGL team’s experience helping to develop public policy in this space.
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.
How might a government encourage more opportunity-led entrepreneurship and science-led innovation careers at a large scale? Igor Asanov et al tackle opportunities in STEM in a RCT funded by the IGL Grants Programme.
The problem with the external validity of impact evaluations has not gone away. Quite the opposite, policymakers in many different sectors have access to an increasing amount of evidence of “what works in a particular context” and policymakers are often left to believe that policy design can be based on evidence of what worked in other contexts.
Small businesses face significant challenges and constraints. Managerial and business skills are crucial elements that affect whether a firm survives and increases their profits. Given this, many business training programmes have been developed and implemented across the globe. But how successful are these programmes?
