Read the latest blogs from the IGL network.
It’s difficult to summarise all the discussions at IGL2018 in Boston. With over 70 speakers, 10 keynotes and debates, 14 hand-on practical sessions, and participants from more than 20 countries, there was plenty of interesting conversations both on stage and during the breaks.
Steve Rader, speaker at IGL2018, outlines the seven ideas that were helpful to their group at NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. as they scaled up their Open Innovation programme.
Reflecting on our latest event, IGL2018, James Phipps discusses some thoughts after his session on experimentation, vouchers and randomised controlled trials.
It was a privilege to attend the 2018 Innovation Growth Lab Conference (IGL2018) that took place at the Harvard Business School and MIT campuses from the 12-14 of June. The experience was — in a word — inspiring. The calibre of people and organisations in attendance as well as the quality of the work presented made it difficult to focus on one aspect to write about.
We thought we had a great idea to spur innovation and growth in the informal furniture sector in Kenya: we opened and operated a tool library in the informal furniture district in Nairobi, Kenya. The tool library, aptly named “WorkShop”, offers capital in the form of access to quality, industrial grade tools, as well as skills in the form of training classes from a five-week curriculum on business practices, technical skills and customer management.
Evidence-based policy making has now become central to the scientific agenda. The amount of rigorous evidence is increasing in all fields but the question of how to best apply this evidence to policy making processes remains a challenge. Particularly, since the evidence comes from a range of contexts, it makes it harder to predict whether a policy will have the same impact in one context as it did elsewhere. Furthermore, there are also implications for how the evidence from another context influences the design and implementation of policies.
As you are reading this, I would expect that there is a policymaker somewhere in the world preparing a paper on how their organisation can help raise productivity. A decade since the global financial crisis and productivity growth remains sluggish for many advanced and developing economies.
Innovation is the driving force behind rising prosperity, yet we don’t often talk about how people become inventors. Now, a study using US data shows that who your parents are - and how much money they have - makes a big difference in your chances of becoming an innovator.
Florence Engasser at Nesta examines why they are harnessing the value of games to help innovation policymakers improve the design and implementation of their policies.
Over the last four years at the Innovation Growth Lab, we've started learning valuable lessons from experiments about how to best support innovation, entrepreneurship, and business growth.
Every year we invest lots of time to understand what are some of the pressing questions that policymakers working on innovation and entrepreneurship have on their radar. We meet with our colleagues, we consult our partners and we engage with our networks in order to identify key challenges and the people at the forefront of addressing them.
As we embark on a series of blogs on (innovation) vouchers, here's some useful reading to get you started!
