Blog
Promoting Digital Adoption Among SMEs in Uruguay
26 February 2025
In 2024, IGL partnered with Uruguay’s National Development Agency (ANDE) on an ambitious initiative: to explore innovative ways to foster digital adoption among the country’s micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This effort is part of “Modo Digital,” an ANDE programme aimed at facilitating business digitalisation and strengthening business models to enhance competitiveness in an ever-evolving market.
From the outset, IGL’s activities have focused on two key pillars: building ANDE’s internal capacity for experimentation and developing rigorous experimental designs. This dual approach not only ensures evidence-based solutions to address specific challenges but also prepares ANDE to lead future experimentation projects autonomously.
A Participatory and Structured Approach
The project began with an intensive ideation workshop in Montevideo, where teams from ANDE and IGL worked side by side to identify key areas that could benefit from experimental interventions. Over three days, participants explored the foundational principles of experimentation, analysed existing data, and conducted participatory exercises to diagnose problems and set priorities.
The first day was dedicated to introducing a broad group of ANDE staff to the principles of experimentation and their relevance for policy design. The next two days, in smaller sessions, focused on teams directly involved in the selected areas. This allowed for deeper discussions of specific challenges and potential solutions, always guided by behavioural science and empirical evidence.
As part of this process, a dedicated workshop on Theories of Change was held, providing a critical tool for defining how selected activities and interventions would translate into expected outcomes. This session helped ANDE teams structure their hypotheses about the causal links between inputs, activities, and results, laying the groundwork for robust experimental design. The theory of change not only guided the development of protocols but also offered a strategic framework for thinking about Modo Digital’s policies.
Designing the Path to Digitalisation
Designing a randomised controlled trial (RCT) is one of the most complex and challenging phases of the experimentation process. Contrary to common expectations, the design stage requires exhaustive analysis and more time investment than other phases. In this project, much of the effort focused on a detailed diagnosis of challenges, leveraging data that had not been previously analysed in depth. This approach not only allowed ANDE to gain a clearer understanding of the barriers SMEs face in adopting digital solutions but also helped them develop new ideas and strategies to make better use of their existing data for policy design and implementation.
IGL introduced conceptual tools such as conversion funnels to analyse the different points at which interest or participation was lost, helping identify the most promising interventions. Moreover, the team worked closely with ANDE, ensuring that decisions were made collaboratively rather than imposed externally. This approach enabled the development of solutions tailored to the local context and aligned with ANDE’s strategic priorities.
The result of this intensive process was two fully developed experimental protocols. These documents not only detail the proposed interventions and evaluation methods but also provide the foundation for executing experiments with rigour and ensuring reliable results. Beyond the experiments themselves, this work has provided ANDE with a stronger framework for designing data- and evidence-informed policies.
More Than a Project: A Model for Collaboration
This project underscores the value of building strong partnerships with agencies ready to embrace innovation from the start. Rigorous experimentation demands careful design and strategic alignment.
“Partnering with IGL has strengthened our ability to design evidence-based policies and test innovative solutions to support SME digitalisation in Uruguay,” noted ANDE.
Through this collaboration, in IGL we believe that this structured approach — rooted in data-driven diagnostics, participatory methods, and robust theoretical frameworks — is necessary to build impactful and credible experiments.
For agencies looking to innovate and generate actionable insights, working closely with IGL from the early stages of design ensures experiments are well-grounded, relevant, and feasible. This experience serves as a blueprint for success, highlighting how collaboration with willing partners leads to designing experiments that could not only produce reliable evidence but also drive meaningful improvements in policy effectiveness.
