Training innovation policymakers to adopt more experimentation
Discover how the training programme delivered by IGL helped EURADA agencies to become more experimental.
Read the latest blogs from the IGL network.
Discover how the training programme delivered by IGL helped EURADA agencies to become more experimental.
Innovation agencies are gradually gaining prominence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The issue of the capabilities of these innovation agencies in the region is of great importance and has been notoriously under-researched. Our latest research highlights certain factors that influence the modus operandi of the innovation agencies that form the Latin American Network of Innovation Agencies (RELAI).
At IGL we have long been interested in the question of what innovation agencies do, and how they can successfully drive innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity within their societies and economies. Over the past few years, we have explored this topic in depth, building on earlier Nesta research that looked at the different roles and approaches taken by innovation agencies around the world.
Our latest research looks at the changing roles of innovation agencies in Europe. One key take away is that to keep up with the rate of change, be it technological or societal, their identities in the future must be led by the needs of the innovators they look to support.
Innovation agencies are responsible for catalysing the development of innovations designed to address unmet societal and economic needs. They fund and support entrepreneurs, companies and other actors to develop, test and scale new products, services and ideas. But how do they ensure that they are continuously learning and innovating themselves?
Spain is on the verge of passing new legislation on policy evaluation. This represents a great opportunity to create the framework that will allow Spain to evaluate its policies and learn more about their impact - but the text is in need of improvement.
This IGL Grant funded trial asks how NGOs and governments can improve youth unemployment, especially women’s labour force participation?
This IGL funded study asks how entrepreneurs spend their time on exploration-led or exploitation-led growth strategies? Are there differences in growth strategies across companies with different growth potential or types of founders? Does supporting entrepreneurs in pursuing specific growth strategies affect the returns to the time spent growing their businesses?
The DepoSIt project – carried out under the European Commission’s INNOSUP-06-2018 programme – involved developing and testing a new support service scheme aimed at increasing the capability of SMEs across Europe to generate business out of social challenges.
In the last few years, Elena Novelli, Alfonso Gambardella and Arnaldo Camuffo at Bocconi University (and colleagues from other institutions around the world), have been running a series of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to understand the impact on entrepreneurial performance of teaching entrepreneurs to operate like scientists when making decisions.
The question of how to raise productivity among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has long presented a challenge to policymakers around the world. In 2018, the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) worked with Innovate UK and IGL to launch an innovative approach to this problem, creating a fund to experiment with interventions to boost productivity among SMEs.
This blog highlights how we have identified a series of topics and questions that policymakers are especially interested in, but where experimental evidence is scarce or nonexistent and the available research is not solid enough to make recommendations about programme design. These open questions encompass exciting and often underexplored research agendas well positioned to both expand the frontier of knowledge and produce policy-relevant research.