Prior research suggests that firms in entrepreneurial settings benefit from a scientific approach to decision making that combines cognitive and evidence-based components. But to what extent and under what conditions is the scientific approach to decision-making associated with superior performance?
IGL Trials Database
IGL curates a database with randomised controlled trials in the field of innovation, entrepreneurship and growth. Browse our list of topics, see it as a map, or use the search function below.
2024
Social ventures that are fundraising through crowdfunding often involve major donors to influence the contributions of smaller donors. We theorize that male and female donors will respond differently to alternative major-donor contribution schemes that are commonly used by social ventures. In a field experiment, donors were randomly assigned to receive one of three solicitation messages about a pair of projects that were seeking funds through crowdfunding. All donors received identical messages, with the exception that information on major-donor involvement was varied across conditions.
2024
Innovating product design is crucial for firms operating in the digital sector as it is closely linked with innovation capability and, therefore, with firm performance and productivity. In this paper, we run a randomized controlled trial to assess if participating in an open innovation initiative increases SMEs’ capability to design more competitive digital products. More specifically, the intervention aimed at increasing firms’ knowledge of the Design Sprint and their readiness to implement user-centered design techniques.
2024
The model shows that managers and entrepreneurs make better decisions under uncertainty if they adopt a scientific approach in which they formulate and test theories.
2024
This study investigates the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the screening processes of early-stage innovations, traditionally conducted by human evaluators, across various professional and competitive settings. Through a randomized controlled trial involving around 400 participants from the MIT Solve expert internal screener team and from community leveraged startups screeners, this research explores whether AI-assisted human evaluators or AI-only evaluations enhance the efficiency and quality of decision-making compared to traditional human-only evaluations.
2024
Scientists and funding agencies invest considerable resources in writing and evaluating grant proposals. But do grant proposal texts noticeably change panel decisions in single blind review? We report on a field experiment conducted by The Dutch Research Council (NWO) in collaboration with the authors in an early-career competition for awards of 800,000 euros of research funding. A random half of panelists were shown a CV and only a one-paragraph summary of the proposed research, while the other half were shown a CV and a full proposal.
2024
In late 2021, Phoenix Group, a FTSE 100 financial services firm and long-term partner of MoreThanNow, asked us to evaluate the impact of an Inclusive Leadership Programme. Everyone involved in the project was aware of the limited evidence for the effectiveness of online diversity training, but the team at Phoenix Group were interested in whether bespoke, best-in-class, inclusivity training for leaders would change behaviour.
2024
Business-science collaboration is essential for fostering innovation and economic development, particularly in rapidly evolving sectors like AI and Energy Efficiency and Sustainability. We study how to enhance the collaboration between firms and scientists given persistent barriers such as information frictions, behavioral biases, and high transaction costs. To address existing challenges, the research investigates the potential of matchmaking interventions.
2024
We evaluate the impact of the UK’s Growth Vouchers Programme, which offered subsidised business advice to 15,207 randomly selected small and medium size enterprises. Using administrative and survey data, we show that the programme increased turnover by 8.2% but only in the short-term and potentially at the expense of non-supported firms. We find that subsidised advice appears to improve firms’ capabilities and practices in a way that is consistent with the increase in turnover.
2024
We conduct a field experiment in partnership with the largest job platform in Brazil to study how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices of firms affect talent allocation. We find both an average job-seeker's preference for ESG and a large degree of heterogeneity across socioeconomic groups, with the strongest preference displayed by highly educated, white, and politically liberal individuals. We combine our experimental estimates with administrative matched employer-employee microdata and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market.
2024
We study whether information frictions and corruption perceptions deter firms from doing business with the government. We conduct two nationwide randomized con- trolled trials (RCTs) in collaboration with the national anti-corruption and public procurement supervisory agency in Uganda.The first RCT aims to increase transparency on available procurement opportunities. We provide firms with direct and timely access to information about government tenders over a two-year period, approximating the existence of a centralized portal for tender notices typical of e-procurement reforms.
2024
We are providing a preview of a project that analyzes two field experiments with 1,974 software developers at Microsoft and Accenture to evaluate the productivity impact of Generative AI. As part of our study, a random subset of developers was given access to GitHub Copilot, an AI-based coding assistant that intelligently suggests ‘completions’ for code. Our preliminary results provide suggestive evidence that these developers became more productive, completing 12.92% to 21.83% more pull requests per week at Microsoft and 7.51% to 8.69% at Accenture (depending on specification).
2024
Despite access to financial resources, many micro and small-scale entrepreneurs struggle to grow their businesses due to management inefficiencies. This study analyses a globally recognized ILO business training initiative in Indonesia, involving 12 financial service providers in 2018. Using an RCT and panel data from 3,975 clients to study the impacts of the business training we find largely null results across a large range of outcomes.
2024
Working from home has become standard for employees with a university degree. The most common scheme, which has been adopted by around 100 million employees in Europe and North America, is a hybrid schedule, in which individuals spend a mix of days at home and at work each week1,2. However, the effects of hybrid working on employees and firms have been debated, and some executives argue that it damages productivity, innovation and career development3,4,5.
2023
Measuring the returns of advertising opportunities continues to be a challenge for many businesses. We design and run a field experiment in collaboration with Yelp across 18,294 firms in the restaurant industry to understand which types of businesses gain more from digital advertising. We randomly assign 7,209 restaurants to freely receive Yelp’s standard ads package for three months. The scale of the experiment gives us a unique opportunity to assess the heterogeneity in advertising effectiveness across a variety of business attributes.
2023
There is a growing belief that scalable and low-cost AI assistance can improve firm decision-making and economic performance. However, running a business involves a myriad of open-ended problems, making it hard to generalize from recent studies showing that generative AI improves performance on well-definedwriting tasks. In our field experiment with 640 Kenyan entrepreneurs, we assessed the impact of AI-generated advice on small business revenues and profits.
2023
Whose problems do investors see as worth solving? I experimentally study how investors evaluate a startup idea based on the socioeconomic background of the founder, the target customer, and the (in)congruence between the two. I am also interested in how the socioeconomic background of investors themselves affect these evaluations. I aim to contribute to the research on diversity and inequality in entrepreneurial funding in which socioeconomic backgrounds have been relatively understudied.
2023
Effective workplace management plays a crucial role in determining employee performance, retention, and subsequently, overall firm performance. While conventional management strategies often emphasize hierarchical relationships, peer-to-peer management, or "managing across," represents a promising yet largely unexplored approach. This study aims to investigate the impact of peer-to-peer management training on various employee outcomes and identify the conditions under which the intervention proves most effective.
2023
Understanding how to design policies to effectively reduce firm-level carbon emissions while minimizing impacts on economic growth is a question of central importance in the battle to mitigate climate change. The EU is proposing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) that will tax imports to better reflect their carbon content. This project evaluates three policies that provide firms with training and assistance obtaining loans with the goal of mitigating the impacts of CBAM on Turkish SMEs.
2023
New AI tools have the potential to change the way workers perform and learn, but little is known about their impacts on the job. In this paper, we study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents. Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14% on average, including a 34% improvement for novice and low-skilled workers but with minimal impact on experienced and highly skilled workers.
2023
In an RCT with US small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where debts are renegotiated so that the business can continue operating. Small businesses are also unaware of a recent major reform that lowered the costs of bankruptcy procedures to enhance their protection.
2023
Management strategies significantly influence worker productivity, retention, career growth, and the overall performance of a firm. Traditional top-down approaches have typically underscored the importance of supervisors in shaping managerial quality and employee performance. Much research suggests that training supervisors to effectively manage their subordinates may be a useful way to enhance supervisor-worker relationships and, in turn, boost firm productivity. However, these approaches may face two primary challenges.
2023
Entrepreneurs persist in business despite low returns. Following the Dunning-Kruger effect and threshold model of exit, we argue that entrepreneurs display general overconfidence in evaluating their relative ability and benchmarking information thus induce exit. To investigate, we administered a randomized controlled trial of benchmarking among 194 Singapore food-stall owners. Both control and treatment owners were informed of their own performance. Additionally, treatment owners were informed of their relative performance and best practices.
2023
Does growth training help entrepreneurs scale-up new ventures? Our field experiment answers this question using data from 181 Singapore-based, early-growth entrepreneurs drawn from a broad range of industry sectors. Treatment content focused on three growth-catalyst tools relevant for formulating and executing innovation-led growth: business-model design, leveraging external networks, building internal teams. Treatment format comprised interactive lecture sessions and workshops on these tools supplemented by personalized coaching in applying the tools to entrepreneurs’ specific challenges.
2023
Failure is widely acknowledged as a critical component of the organizational learning and innovation processs. Learning from failure, in particular, seems extremely relevant in the context of entrepreneurship, where failure often emerges as the predominant outcome. Remarkably, most entrepreneurship training programs predominantly emphasize success stories of entrepreneurs, without leveraging the learning potential that come from stories of failure.
2023
As more and more activities in the economy become digitized, analytics and data-driven decision-making (DDD) are becoming increasingly important. The adoption of analytics and DDD has been slower in small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) compared to large firms, and reliable causal estimates of the impacts of analytics tools for small businesses have been lacking. We derive experiment-based estimates of the effect of an analytics tool on SME outcomes, analyzing the randomized introduction of eBay’s Seller Hub (SH), a data-rich seller dashboard.
2023
Entrepreneurs in developing countries face a series of diverse constraints to growth, including lack of access to business skills, markets, and finance. The binding constraints vary from firm to firm, implying that the returns to possible interventions are likely to be heterogeneous.