Nesta
To facilitate the use of field experiments in the economics of science, innovation, entrepreneurship, and productivity
The Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) is a global collaboration that enables, supports, undertakes, and disseminates experimental research about the design of programs and institutions for promoting economic growth through innovation. Since 2014, IGL has launched more than 70 field experiments in 28 countries with the cooperation of more than 35 government agencies. Rigorous findings so far concern everything from the effectiveness of “innovation vouchers” for small and medium businesses to the importance of role models in promoting diversity among entrepreneurs. In the U.S., partners like the Economic Development Administration, Small Business Administration, and NASA have begun working with IGL to meet their obligations under the bipartisan Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018.Over the next three years, IGL’s new initiatives will both strengthening such connections in the United States specifically, as well as providing even more services and activities to support the global community of experimentalists studying science, innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. A major IGL undertaking will be to take over the organization of the Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (CFXS), an annual and significant conference that attracts more than 350 leading scholars from all over the world.Plans include the addition of special workshops and seed grants for the many PhD candidates and early career scholars who attend CFXS in search of help with conducting their first field experiments. Randomized Controlled Trials can be particularly challenging to design and administer. Because they are often large-scale, time consuming, and expensive, too, nobody wants to discover in the middle of running such an experiment that they forgot about some crucial consideration or variable. That is one of the reasons why the work of organizations like IGL is so valuable.