The aim of this project is to increase the effectiveness of entrepreneurship and business support programmes by creating an easy-to-use resource that can help policymakers and practitioners to delve into insights from experimental studies, particularly randomised controlled trials (RCTs).
To do this, we’ve created a series of short and actionable evidence summaries to make relevant insights easy to understand so that they can help you to improve schemes to support entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We’ve named these summaries ‘Evidence Bites’.
What you will find in these Evidence Bites
Evidence-informed ideas to improve your entrepreneurship and business support schemes
All the insights we’ve uncovered are organised under questions that you may face when designing a new support scheme or rethinking an existing one.
We highlight design and implementation features that, according to the studies reviewed, could make interventions more impactful. To weed out ineffective ideas that you may want to steer clear of, we also list approaches that have been tried but failed to achieve promising results or, in some cases, have even been shown to be detrimental.
How to use these Evidence Bites
Judge whether the presented ideas are likely to work in your context and use them to inspire and improve your own schemes
Empirical evidence is rarely directly transferable across contexts. On the contrary, deep knowledge about the original context and where the study will be implemented next is needed to assess whether a programme is likely to work.
To help overcome this challenge, Evidence Bites contain short summaries of the evaluated programmes, including information on the original context, how changes occurred and the specifics of the scheme in terms of design and delivery.
When using the Evidence Bites, we expect your experience and contextualised knowledge built from years of supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses to help you to judge which ideas are more likely to work in your context and to adapt them as needed.
How to contribute to growing the exisiting evidence base
Work with the Innovation Growth Lab to test new ideas and contribute more insights
The body of evidence that robustly evaluates the effectiveness of different schemes to support entrepreneurs and small businesses is still scarce. This means that the ideas we present are based on a small number of studies.
As a consequence, you might have questions that the existing evidence base can’t provide answers for. You may also find that an idea you find interesting has only been tried and tested in settings that don’t resemble your own. That’s why replicating and retesting the ideas we present in these Evidence Bites in your own context would be so valuable.
If you find yourself in this position, why not drop us a line? We look forward to working with you and our research network to set up randomised experiments to pilot and test ideas together.
More information
If you want more information about this project, please contact us at [email protected]
