Blog

Read the latest blogs from the IGL network.

The future roles of European innovation agencies must be led by the needs of innovators

By Nyangala Zolho on Wednesday, 25 January 2023.

Our latest research looks at the changing roles of innovation agencies in Europe. One key take away is that to keep up with the rate of change, be it technological or societal, their identities in the future must be led by the needs of the innovators they look to support.

Building a community of experimental innovation agencies: insights from IGL’s work with TAFTIE

By Alex Glennie on Thursday, 22 December 2022.

Innovation agencies are responsible for catalysing the development of innovations designed to address unmet societal and economic needs. They fund and support entrepreneurs, companies and other actors to develop, test and scale new products, services and ideas. But how do they ensure that they are continuously learning and innovating themselves?

Three recommendations to improve Spain's Public Policy Evaluation Bill

By Sara Garcia Arteagoitia, Hugo Cuello, Edoardo Trimarchi on Tuesday, 6 September 2022.

Spain is on the verge of passing new legislation on policy evaluation. This represents a great opportunity to create the framework that will allow Spain to evaluate its policies and learn more about their impact - but the text is in need of improvement.

Venture growth strategy: How do entrepreneurs spend their time?

By Juanita Gonzalez-Uribe, Michael Leatherbee and Santiago Reyes Ortega on Thursday, 7 July 2022.

This IGL funded study asks how entrepreneurs spend their time on exploration-led or exploitation-led growth strategies? Are there differences in growth strategies across companies with different growth potential or types of founders? Does supporting entrepreneurs in pursuing specific growth strategies affect the returns to the time spent growing their businesses?

Running an RCT with SMEs: Secrets of success

By Elena Novelli on Tuesday, 14 June 2022.

In the last few years, Elena Novelli, Alfonso Gambardella and Arnaldo Camuffo at Bocconi University (and colleagues from other institutions around the world), have been running a series of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to understand the impact on entrepreneurial performance of teaching entrepreneurs to operate like scientists when making decisions.

Four years of the UK’s Business Basics Programme – what have we learned

By James Phipps & Rob Fuller on Tuesday, 14 June 2022.

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.

Science to perfect the art: Experimental evidence gaps in entrepreneurship and business support

By Sara Garcia Arteagoitia and Anna Segura on Tuesday, 31 May 2022.

This blog highlights how we have identified a series of topics and questions that policymakers are especially interested in, but where experimental evidence is scarce or nonexistent and the available research is not solid enough to make recommendations about programme design. These open questions encompass exciting and often underexplored research agendas well positioned to both expand the frontier of knowledge and produce policy-relevant research.

Looking Beyond Digital Adoption: A New Business Support Experiment to Open the Window to a Company’s Digital Soul

By A PrOPEL Hub Project led by Richard Kneller, Cher Li, and Anwar Adem (University of Nottingham) on Monday, 23 May 2022.

How can outsiders nudge businesses to make better use of digital technologies? This project tested a simple low-cost intervention - providing information about how the performance of their website compared to their peers - and saw companies making clear improvements as a result.

Pages