Project

Towards better business support: Extending learning from the Business Basics experiments

SME technology adoption Experimental research

Over several years, the UK’s Business Basics Programme encouraged business-support providers to experiment with new approaches to assist small and medium-sized enterprises in adopting new technologies and management techniques. Together with partners at the Enterprise Research Centre and City St Georges, University of London, IGL is now following up on several of these experiments, using data on business performance over the longer term to assess what can be learned for the design and evaluation of future business-support programmes.

Data on businesses that participated in several of the Business Basics experiments is being linked to official records on business turnover and employment, to assess:

What evidence is there on the long-term impact of the interventions tested?
How do estimates from quasi-experimental methods compare to those from the randomised experiments?
What types of businesses tended to participate in the experiments, and what are the consequences of this for generalisability of the findings?
Do outcomes from the interim evaluation predict business growth in the future?