Unlocking Innovative Potential: Experimentation Fund

Innovation offers huge potential to improve health, better connect people, and make our societies more productive and sustainable. At the same time, it can also fuel inequality. The UK has incredible, diverse talent across the country but opportunities to be a part of R&D are not equally spread. In addition, evidence about ways to reduce barriers holding back the potential of people and businesses across the country is limited.

The Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) at Nesta will support efforts to expand and diversify the R&D sector's workforce by enabling a step change in how interventions are evaluated and optimised through experimental approaches. In connection with the need to address long-standing regional economic disparities and deliver inclusive growth and innovation (specifically accounting for the lack of exposure to innovation processes), IGL will:

Identify and deliver two feasibility studies within existing policy programmes, that will uncover actionable insights about the viability of growing the number of future innovators and diversify the background of who gets to contribute to high-growth R&D sectors in the UK (with an intention to take these experiment ideas to the field);
Build a coalition of expert academics who beyond the isolated feasibility studies can enable continued research about how the UK might deliver inclusive growth and innovation, while addressing long-standing regional economic disparities. This coalition will help ensure policy relevancy and research novelty;
Help policymakers to better understand how they might widen entry and reduce barriers to participation in innovation processes.
In a policy area where so much is unknown regarding "what works" to increase access and scale the innovative potential of communities who have traditionally been kept out of innovation processes, the two feasibility studies can help transform the current approach to policymaking through experimentation.