It’s the end of the year again (and yes, as usual it has gone fast!). At IGL we’ve been busy developing new partnerships, launching new projects, and growing our team. We’ve continued to deliver on the mission that we set out, supporting governments to become more experimental and data-driven, and helping address some of the key policy challenges that policymakers in this field face.
To do so, we’ve launched our new Data and Technology Unit, which has been collaborating with the European Innovation Council (EIC) and many other innovation agencies across Europe to help them understand how best to extract value from the data they hold, and how to open it up to the research community. For instance, a novel synthetic datathon we set up with the EIC has attracted researchers from around the world to apply frontier data science methods to the data that the EIC holds in-house.
We’ve also given a fresh boost to the IGL Research Network with the support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Now bringing together over 150 academic researchers, our aim is to help enable high-impact experimental research that helps understand how to improve science, innovation and productivity. I’m actually writing this blog from the INSEAD campus near Paris, where we are co-hosting the annual Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (CFXS), bringing together many network members and the broader experimental research community in the field. We’ve also launched our new IGL Seed Grants funding programme (currently open for applications), and are also accepting nominations for the IGL Annual Prizes for best experimental research paper.
Our commitment to help organisations become more experimental has continued. We’ve helped our partners explore potential experimental programmes, for instance through our Impact Accelerator. We have also continued our work to help institutions build their infrastructure for experimentation, for instance working with the European Commission to embed experimentation in EU R&I programmes.
While our work spans a broad range of policies to accelerate science, innovation and productivity, we’ve identified 4 policy challenges to focus more of our efforts on. This last year we’ve kicked off experimental work that will move us closer to finding evidence-based solutions to address them:
- Improving science and innovation funding:We’ve supported the newly formed UK government’s Metascience Unit to design the first batch of RCTs on how to improve their funding programmes, with the first one already in the field. We’ve also partnered with the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) to launch a new accelerator for innovation and research funding experiments (AFIRE), with a global consortium of public and private science funders. We will also be soon publishing a new empirical study on the impact of AI on science.
- Bridging academia and industry: We’ve been collaborating with an EU-funded consortium (ATTRACT) led by CERN to explore potential experiments in science commercialisation and industry-academia collaboration. We’ll be launching our new Ideas Handbook in January, so sign up here to receive it and here to register for the event.
- Building inclusive innovation ecosystems: With our new UKRI-funded experimental programme on unlocking innovative potential we’ve brought together policymakers, researchers and delivery organisations to design experimental pilots to increase and diversify R&D skills and talent. The first trial is about to get to the field, with more to come.
- Boosting SMEs productivity: Helping SMEs adopt better management practices and technologies has been a long standing priority area for IGL. This year we’ve published the final report of the Business Basics experimental fund that we set up with the UK government and kicked off new work with several agencies (including a new partnership with Colombia’s Innpulsa). We are also looking back at long term impacts of some of the first trials that the UK government, supported by IGL colleagues, set up in this space many years ago.
In our recap last year, we shared some good news about how government agencies across the OECD were taking bold steps to become more experimental in their innovation policies, and we are very pleased that this trend is continuing.
I’d also like to end this year’s blog with some good news from a survey we conducted in six different European countries. Experimentation is more popular than many think: the majority of citizens support governments doing policy experiments, even if they think that others will not. So if you are thinking that you should not try to set up a policy experiment because others will not like it, think again! Who knows if you might be surprised.
The world has changed a lot in the ten years since IGL was launched. The progress we’ve seen would not have been possible without the support and engagement from our many partners, to which we are immensely thankful. We look forward to strengthening these collaborations and developing new ones, so reach out to us if you would like to explore how we could collaborate.
We cannot share much yet, but we are excited for what is to come in 2025…as there are some major IGL announcements forthcoming…so watch this space!
Until then, best wishes for the holidays and 2025!