Lost Innovative Potential

Team

Nyangala Zolho

Nyangala is a Policy Learning Designer at the Innovation Growth Lab’s (IGL) Policy team.

She helps IGL partners and the wider policy community to share and learn from policy ideas.

Since joining Nesta in 2018, Nyangala has worked to deliver impact through strategic communications and programme design, having supported the delivery of Nesta’s 2030 strategy. Prior to Nesta, Nyangala worked for several years for a human rights and technology startup. She has worked for both profit and non-profit organisations to deliver programmes that are multidisciplinary and mission driven.

Nyangala has a degree in International Relations and holds a MA in Global Media and Transnational Communications from Goldsmith’s, University of London. Her personal interests tend to fall into three main categories: social justice, design and technology.

Edoardo Trimarchi

Edoardo Trimarchi is Policy Lead for the Innovation Growth Lab (IGL).

In this role, Edoardo contributes to the development and growth of IGL’s programme of work to create more experimental policy ecosystems.

Before joining IGL in 2022, Edoardo was the Senior Policy Manager of the Abdul Latif Jameel Policy Action Lab (J-PAL) office for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago, Chile. For three years he led J-PAL LAC’s policy team in identifying opportunities to promote the use of evidence in policy making, built partnerships with governments, donors and civil society organisations across the region, and provided technical assistance for the scale-up and replication of successful interventions. He joined J-PAL LAC in 2017 as a Senior Research Associate working on a White Paper on youth crime and violence prevention in Mexico. Previously, he worked in Colombia with J-PAL LAC and Innovations for Poverty Action on a project for the institutionalisation of evidence use within the Monitoring and Public Policy Evaluation Unit of Colombia's National Department of Planning.

Edoardo also conducted field research in Bolivia and Colombia, and interned at the Democratic Governance Unit of the United Nations Development Programme in the Dominican Republic. Edoardo has an MSc in Sustainable Development - International Development from Utrecht University and a BA in Economics from Bocconi University.

Alex Glennie

Alex is the Head of Policy Engagement and Learning at the Innovation Growth Lab (IGL).

She leads engagement work with IGL's international network of innovation policymakers, supporting them to embed experimentation practices in how they work and facilitating learning opportunities between them. Current projects include a comparative study of more than 40 innovation agencies across Europe and Latin America in partnership with the TAFTIE network and the Inter-American Development Bank, and management of stakeholder engagement activities within a major EU project on engaging citizens in the work of research and innovation funding organisations.

Before joining IGL in 2020, Alex held a number of different roles at Nesta, conducting research on inclusive innovation policies, and working with government innovation agencies around the world on strategy development. Prior to this, she worked at the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, managing research and policy projects relating to migration, international development, integration and diversity. She is an accredited coach, and works with individuals and teams on leadership development. She is also co-author of Inclusive Innovation (2022) a title in the Routledge Studies in Innovation, Organizations and Technology series.

David Ampudia

David is a Data Scientist at the Innovation Growth Lab (IGL).

His role at the Lab focuses on helping grow the team’s capability for using data analysis and statistics to uncover and pursue opportunities to improve the effectiveness and equity of innovation and business policy.

Prior to joining the IGL in 2022, David worked as a Research Fellow at the Data Center of the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). His work involved the development of state-of-the-art sequential decision-making algorithms, with a particular focus on Bayesian Optimization and multi-armed bandits. He also contributed to multiple political economy projects, helping develop and implement improved methodologies using novel data sources and techniques. As a member of the Center, David has taught text-based deep learning courses at the Summer School of the BSE for several years now. Before this, David worked as an economic consultant for FocusEconomics, a macroeconomic research and forecasting institute.

David holds a one-year MSc in Data Science Methodology from the Barcelona School of Economics, and a two-year MRes in Analysis and Policy in Economics at the Paris School of Economics. He also has a BA in International Economics from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Duration

June 2022-Present

Within our stream of work on inclusive innovation, IGL is developing an ambitious initiative to recover the lost innovation potential of groups traditionally left out of innovation processes and careers. Our aim is to find out where and why people and places get ‘lost’, and to ideate, test and scale solutions to this challenge. Our vision is to help create a world where innovators from all backgrounds are able to contribute to driving inclusive, productive and sustainable economies.

This initiative will:

Generate and spread new ideas for experiments, policies and programmes that support the recovery of the lost innovative potential;
Conduct experiments in collaboration with policymakers, practitioners and researchers helping to grow evidence of what works;
Help decision makers analyse and use data and evidence to improve the design and implementation of solutions to unlock untapped potential, and scale effective interventions.

The challenge

Innovation offers huge potential to increase productivity and economic growth, and to improve life for people and the planet. However, innovative sectors are often characterised by a stark lack of diversity, meaning that women, minoritised groups and individuals from low-income families do not participate in them to the same degree as men from high-income families. While there are pockets of evidence about the challenge, there is a lack of robust evidence about ways to reduce barriers holding back the innovative and productive potential of people and businesses.

Existing evidence we wish to build from includes:

The landmark study (Bell et. al, 2018) that showed us how in the United States alone, children from high-income families (the top 1%) are 10 times more likely to become investors than children from below-median families (the bottom 50%). Innovation in the U.S. could therefore quadruple if women, minorities, and children from low-income families became inventors at the same rate as high-income families.
Research from Denmark that uncovered how significant parental role models are, as intermediaries, impacting the mindset about who gets to invent and subsequently who goes on to (Hoisl et al., 2022).
A review by Nesta that found interventions focused on getting children interested in inventing reached less than 1.5 per cent of school age children, with children from more privileged schools more likely to take part. The same review found that there was also very little evidence and experimentation on the impact of these interventions (Gabriel et al. 2018).
IGL research into ways combined design and data methods can help uncover targeted insights on who is left behind in existing pathways to innovative careers, and ways to recover missing innovators.

Our approach

To achieve our ambitious goals, we are looking at the entire pipeline supporting would-be inventors to reach their full potential, from early childhood through to education, training and routes to excel within professional careers. We know that there is no one-size-fits all approach to addressing such a complex problem, and that context plays a huge role in who gets marginalised and left behind. Therefore, our work is informed by ideas and evidence about what works across different contexts, but individual projects are locally grounded in how this issue presents itself from place to place.

We do this through diving into existing data sets to uncover insights about how the challenge presents itself in particular contexts; conducting policy design sprints to ideate on intervention ideas that can be robustly tested to generate evidence; convening experts and policymakers to review existing evidence and gaps, and champion recommended solutions.

Work with us to drive change

If you would like to be a part of this initiative, there are many ways to support our evolving programme of work:

For funders - there is an opportunity to invest in our programme and take a leading role in pushing the needle forward on this challenge;
For policymakers and practitioners - partner with us to identify specific policies and programmes that enable the recovery of the lost innovative potential, and then conduct tests and use experimental learning to improve their impact;
For researchers - bring your expertise and ideas to work that will effect change and impact at the policy level

Resources