On the search for evidence: running three RCTs
Read about the journey FFG embarked upon in the search for evidence through our two-blogs series! This is the first blog of the series depicting the cases considered.
Read about the journey FFG embarked upon in the search for evidence through our two-blogs series! This is the first blog of the series depicting the cases considered.
IGL's Senior Researcher reflects on her experience in supporting the TAFTIE network of European Innovation Agencies to face issues such as university-business collaboration
Innovation agencies are gradually gaining prominence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The issue of the capabilities of these innovation agencies in the region is of great importance and has been notoriously under-researched. Our latest research highlights certain factors that influence the modus operandi of the innovation agencies that form the Latin American Network of Innovation Agencies (RELAI).
At IGL we have long been interested in the question of what innovation agencies do, and how they can successfully drive innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity within their societies and economies. Over the past few years, we have explored this topic in depth, building on earlier Nesta research that looked at the different roles and approaches taken by innovation agencies around the world.
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.
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?
The DepoSIt project – carried out under the European Commission’s INNOSUP-06-2018 programme – involved developing and testing a new support service scheme aimed at increasing the capability of SMEs across Europe to generate business out of social challenges.
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.
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.
What's next in Business Training? In our latest blog post we chart the course for effective policies and necessary research to further use and generate rigorous evidence in the field.