Read the latest blogs from the IGL network.
Entrepreneurship is a major source of job creation and is considered to be an engine of economic growth and innovation. As a result, there is no shortage of initiatives to promote it. Governments across the world spend billions subsidising entrepreneurial activities, companies increasingly introduce measures to encourage workers to engage in entrepreneurship, and investors are constantly on the lookout for potential “winners”.
Embarking on a journey of policy experimentation might be easier with just a first small step… Keen to encourage a culture of experimentation amongst policy makers, IGL has been examining the barriers that prevent its adoptions – finding that these include a reluctance to disrupt the status quo, fears of a backlash if ‘lotteries’ are used to allocate support or simply that evaluation is considered too late.
Last December we co-hosted our winter Research Meeting at Harvard Business School, together with Professors Karim Lakhani and Rembrand Koning. Over 50 researchers were welcomed for a day packed with eight presentations of early-stage, ongoing and completed randomised controlled trials (RCTs).
Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) are considered by many to be the gold standard in demonstrating the real impact of an intervention such as the introduction of a new medicine; but translating the approach to the social sciences is not without challenges. Within the field of public policy, conducting an RCT can be viewed as a challenge to traditional institutional practices, raise ethical and political concerns, and be too complex for non-expert staff to design and implement.
What prevents government agencies from making a greater use of randomised controlled trials (RCTs), as well as evidence to inform their policies? Last summer we set out to answer this question, and to try and tease out which barrier is the most important. In this blog we present the results from our survey.
An IGL Grant funded RCT in a large international firm looks at the effect of communication with employees on internal innovation competitions.
IGL is undertaking a study on the barriers that prevent organisations from using randomised controlled trials to evaluate programmes and, more generally, using evidence to inform policies. Take part in our survey to give us your perspective.
Dane Stangler, vice-president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, spoke at the first annual IGL Conference on what challenges the future holds for entrepreneurship.
On May 24-26 we welcomed over 200 senior policy makers, practitioners and researchers working in innovation, entrepreneurship and growth policy at the IGL Conference. Here are three quick takeaways from the events.
Triin Edovald discusses the main lessons from one of the sessions held at our 2016 IGL Global Conference
Ahead of our #IGL16 conference on 24-26 May, Geoff Mulgan and Albert Bravo-Biosca explore the growing movement of experimental innovation policy.
As more and more governments attempt to base their policies on sound evidence, randomised controlled trials - the 'gold standard' in evaluation - are gaining a stronger role in determining which policies work. But are they really the best way to tell us which policies should be used? This blogpost explores how to improve our ability to learn and better design things that work.
