Blog
Building a culture of experimental evidence
What we have learned from the IGL Grants Programme
21 July 2026
When IGL was created back in 2014, only a few randomised experiments had been carried out in innovation policy. We faced a chicken and egg problem: how could we convince policymakers that they should demand rigorous evidence, when there was little existing evidence available to demonstrate how persuasive and effective it could be?
One way we approached this was to make funding available for researchers to carry out policy experiments. We partnered with Argidius and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to launch the IGL Grants Programme. Between 2014 and 2019, a total of £2.6 million was awarded to 42 projects, all aimed at using randomised experiments to probe the drivers of innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity and to evaluate the effectiveness of a range of policy interventions. For many researchers, this was the first time they were able to put their ideas for experimentation in innovation policy into practice on the ground.
The projects funded covered a wide range of topics, from idea generation to entrepreneurship education to mobilising business funding. We intentionally took risks to support promising ideas even if they would be challenging to implement, so – as expected – not all of the 42 projects were successful. But the funding has led to 29 randomised experiments being carried out in 20 countries around the world, two thirds of which were in OECD countries. (Another two of the projects resulted in non-randomised studies, and a handful are still ongoing.) To date, 24 papers have been published in academic journals or have been made available as working papers. Several have been published in top journals in the economics or management fields and have gained widespread recognition among researchers and policymakers.
Key insights from the field
What can we learn from these studies? Each of the experiments have generated insights on the particular mechanisms or interventions they were testing. The key themes include:
- People can be nudged into acting as innovators. Rigtering et al. (2019) showed that enrolling employees by default in an innovation competition increased participation without compromising the quality of the ideas submitted. Graff Zivin & Lyons (2019) found that students who were given a monetary incentive to enter an innovation contest ultimately outperformed those who signed up of their own accord.
- “Rational quitting” can be a positive outcome. Two studies (Camuffo et al. 2020 and Lee et al. 2024) found that business training prompted entrepreneurs to shut down startups that had little potential to succeed. The remaining businesses were higher quality and grew faster than the control groups, so the net effects were positive.
- The content of a training programme matters. Camuffo et al. (2020) found that teaching entrepreneurs to adopt a scientific approach to decision-making yielded far better results than conventional business training.
- Matching the type support to the needs of the individual or business can be crucial. In Egypt, substantially expanding credit availability was a boon to some businesses, but led others to take on more risk than they could manage (Bryan et al. 2024). In Colombia, Gonzalez-Uribe et al. (2024) found that training for most startups should focus on building management capacity, but that a minority of businesses with high growth potential could benefit much more from training oriented towards exploration of new opportunities. Soft-skills training in Jamaica only had an impact among men (Ubfal et al. 2022), whereas the impacts of an intensive entrepreneurship training programme for young people in Tanzania were restricted to women (Calderone et al. 2023).
- Charging for training involves trade-offs. Higher fees in Jamaica deterred poorer, older, and risk-averse founders, but helped to target the training at those who expected to benefit most, and led to participants being more committed. (Maffioli et al. 2023).
- Entrepreneurs don’t always know what they need. In an accelerator programme in Chile, highly educated founders wanted more structured accountability mechanisms even though they were not of benefit to them, while less-educated founders rejected the accountability mechanisms they actually needed (Leatherbee et al. 2023).
- Benign-sounding interventions can have unintended negative effects. School entrepreneurship training in Rwanda pushed some students to launch businesses that had little potential to succeed, resulting in lower employment rates and income three years later (Blimpo & Pugatch 2023). In Ecuador, showing high-school students videos of role models from the worlds of business and science actually decreased enrollment in STEM subjects at university (Asanov et al. 2026). Giving students on an entrepreneurship project too much choice over their teammates or what they would work on led to overconfidence and worse performance (Boss et al. 2021).
If there’s one key lesson to learn from across the portfolio of studies, it’s that we can’t predict the impacts of an intervention from theory alone. Rigorous testing of the impacts is crucial.
Several of these studies have also adopted innovative methods that have a lot of potential to be applied in designing programmes elsewhere. Bryan et al. (2024), for example, revealed that there can be a lot of value in using psychometric surveys to understand how entrepreneurs will react to a new opportunity. (Although if using this approach for targeting interventions, we’d also need to consider how this might alter responses.) And the approach to assessing willingness to pay used by Maffioli et al. (2023) could be extremely useful when piloting new programmes. This has already sparked conversations with policymakers about how to determine the optimal level of subsidies.
Fostering a global community of experimentalists
Twelve years on, it is clear that the IGL Grants Programme has helped to lower the barriers to high-impact experimental research. There is now a thriving community of researchers carrying out rigorous experiments in this area. The IGL Research Network has more than 300 members and is growing rapidly. The annual Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (CFXS) and the IGL Experimentation Webinar Series provide forums for researchers to showcase and share their ideas with each other. And we’ve already launched two rounds of seed grants and annual prizes to enable and reward the next generation of experimental research.
While the IGL Grants Programme has now come to an end, its legacy continues to shape the future of policymaking in business and innovation policy. Our experience was pivotal in convincing the European Commission and the British government to launch their own experimentation funds, which unlocked $15 million to fund experiments in innovation and productivity policy. This has in turn led to further experiments and influenced further policy investment. By funding a portfolio of groundbreaking experiments, fostering a global community of scholars and generating valuable insights, the programme has clearly demonstrated that experimentation in innovation policy is possible and that it can advance the frontiers of knowledge.