Entrepreneurship and business growth

New ideas and robust evidence to aid entrepreneurship and business growth

Why it matters

Reversing the decline in productivity growth requires the entry of innovative startups, the growth of high-productivity firms, and the wider adoption of productivity-enhancing practices and technologies. Governments spend billions each year on programmes to support entrepreneurs and businesses towards this aim but it’s unclear how effective these are. Business leaders themselves may also be wondering what practices and technologies to embrace to improve their own performance.

While the evidence base is slowly growing, there are still too many unknowns about how best to design schemes, whether these are entrepreneurship training, subsidised management advice or export support schemes. Policymakers and practitioners often lack sufficient information to understand the problem they hope to address or what choices to take with regard to programme design, content, targeting and recruitment. IGL helps policymakers to access and generate evidence to design more impactful interventions, while opening new research avenues for academic researchers interested in addressing policy-relevant questions. 

Entrepreneurship and business growth

IGL has delivered and supported a range of projects that have evaluated different policies and programmes to support entrepreneurs and businesses. Within this an area of focus has been on support for businesses to adopt new technologies and achieve sustainable growth. Most notably, we partnered with the UK Department for Business and Trade and Innovate UK to deliver the Business Basics Programme, which pioneered the use of an experimentation fund to the challenge of raising SME productivity.

Through our different programmes we’ve also supported experimental research exploring the most effective approach to entrepreneurship training, different models for business advice provision, or the impact of funding programmes. 

In addition to generating new evidence and insights, through our Evidence Bites portal we have summarised the evidence in some of these areas, and have collated ideas on what could be tested next, for instance in Entrepreneurship Education, Business Consulting, and Business Training, and many other policy-relevant areas. 

We are keen to work with policymakers and practitioners who are seeking help to generate new ideas, access evidence and develop evaluations.

Key resources