Blog

The Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) is delighted to announce the launch of the Unlocking Innovative Potential: Experimentation Programme. This one-year project, funded by UK Research and Innovation, supports the efforts to expand and diversify the UK R&D workforce by enabling a step change in how interventions are evaluated and optimised.

The question of how to raise productivity among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has long presented a challenge to policymakers around the world. In 2018, the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) worked with Innovate UK and IGL to launch an innovative approach to this problem, creating a fund to experiment with interventions to boost productivity among SMEs.

In IGL we’re firmly convinced that there are major benefits to experimentation in public policy, to find out what works and to make programmes work better before they are launched at scale. But it has never been clear how much our enthusiasm for experiments is shared among the wider public. We recently had the opportunity to look into this, and found that the public have a much better understanding of the need for experimentation than we’d realised.

2023 saw IGL kick off exciting new partnerships and projects, deepen relationships with longstanding collaborators, and break new ground both in how we work and our thematic areas of focus. This blog shares highlights of our year, and looks ahead to what’s on our radar for 2024.

Our insights on driving strategic learning for transformative innovation born out of policy dialogues organised as a member of the Transformative Innovation Network