Advancing a shared agenda to drive impact
Building more productive, inclusive and sustainable economies is key to addressing many of the societal challenges that we face. Governments around the world spend hundreds of billions every year on policies to accelerate science, innovation, entrepreneurship and growth. But there is little appetite to rigorously experiment with new policy ideas and little credible evidence of what works and what doesn’t. As a result, large amounts of money may be being wasted in ineffective schemes. Even more worryingly, ideas that could lead to the big innovations of tomorrow may never be developed if we lack the right instruments to nurture them.
At IGL we are shaping a new policy experimentation ecosystem across the globe, focused on evidence-based and cost effective solutions to the pressing challenges of equitable growth and innovation, ensuring high impact investments in policies critical to current and future prosperity.
Support from our donors and funders enables us to conduct innovative research, identify the most effective solutions, and create valuable public resources that support policymakers, researchers and practitioners worldwide.
We also support funders in achieving their goals, making their efforts as effective and impactful as possible. For example, we recently worked with the Research on Research Institute to produce an “Experimental Research Funders’ Handbook”.
Through our wide portfolio of work we make policy more experimental and data-driven, developing a global infrastructure for experimentation and data, generating evidence, funding research, building capabilities, bringing together the policy and research communities, and disseminating lessons learned so that they are scaled.
We also have a number of thematic programmes that seek address key policy challenges, including on:
- Science and Innovation funding: Improving how science and innovation funding mechanisms are designed and run.
- Future innovation agencies: Analysing and supporting strategic decision-making in innovation policy institutions.
- University-industry collaboration: Bridging the gap between university and industry to accelerate science commercialisation and drive societal impact
- Inclusive innovation: Creating more inclusive innovation systems and recovering lost innovative potential.
- SME technology adoption: Exploring how policy can help businesses to adopt new technologies and practices to boost productivity and transition to net zero.
In all of these areas we are bringing together leading organisations, researchers, practitioners and funders to ideate, develop, test and scale cost-effective solutions.
If you're a funder interested in hearing more about our future plans and ideas for collaborative projects, please don't hesitate to reach out. We are eager to connect and explore opportunities for collaboration.
Resources
- Discover more of our mission, history and impact.
- Explore our policy and thematic areas to identify overlap between your priorities and our work.
- Are you a funder that is interested in experimenting with your grantmaking process? In our “Experimental Research Funders Handbook” you will find lots of promising ideas and relevant questions that can guide you in how to think about becoming more experimental
- Our annual Global Conference is a three-day event that brings together policymakers, practitioners and researchers to showcase and debate the latest trends and cutting-edge ideas in innovation, science, entrepreneurship and business policy.
- Stay connected with our work and receive the latest updates by subscribing to our monthly newsletter.