Resource
Entrepreneurship education and inclusive innovation in Northern Ireland: a pilot experiment
29 January 2026
Innovation offers huge potential to benefit people and society at large. However, participation in innovation remains unequal.
To help address this issue, we worked with a range of delivery, research and policy partners via the “Unlocking Innovative Potential” (UIP) programme. One area of focus was on augmenting the evidence base on the value of entrepreneurial education for increasing inclusive innovation.
In this report, ”Entrepreneurship education and inclusive innovation in Northern Ireland: a pilot experiment”, we present the findings from a pilot experiment conducted by the Innovation Growth Lab (IGL), Catalyst, and an external academic researcher, as part of the UIP programme.
The pilot experiment was a feasibility study about the potential to apply a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) to the evaluation of Catalyst’s Hello Possible programme – an entrepreneurship education initiative aimed at increasing inclusive innovation in Northern Ireland.
The main findings show that:
- Catalyst has succeeded in recruiting participants from underrepresented backgrounds.
- Hello Possible is associated with an increase in confidence and self-efficacy, and improved understanding of entrepreneurship.
- Despite positive signals, the potential of the pilot study to scale up to a full RCT was low under current conditions, owing to limited ability to expand the programme. Although the programme itself seemed ready for testing, future rigorous evaluation would depend on securing the resources and capacity to significantly increase participant numbers to reach statistical significance.
