EU Industry Week: Boosting‌ ‌experimental‌ ‌innovation‌ policy ‌to‌ ‌encourage‌ ‌SME‌ ‌growth‌ ‌in‌ ‌Europe

The Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) is a global initiative that works to increase the impact of innovation and growth policy, by ensuring that it is informed by new ideas and robust evidence. IGL works at the intersection of research and policy, where it helps organisations become more experimental, test ideas, and learn from each other.

Increasing EU competitiveness demands effective SME support. We believe that finding the most impactful approaches requires combining new ideas with rigorous testing. In this session, we will showcase why the EU has encouraged a more experimental approach to innovation policy. Drawing on the experience of European innovation agencies, a presentation and a panel discussion will showcase how attendees can also use experiments to increase SMEs’ productivity.

The session will be chaired by IGL and will consist of a virtual workshop with a panel discussion and interactive activities. We will be launching a new report on ‘How innovation agencies are embracing more randomised experiments’, and will be presenting a short video animation. Speakers will include:

Chair:

Alex Glennie (Senior Policy Manager, IGL)

Introductory remarks:

Isoline Roger-Dalbert (Policy Officer – SME Support to Innovation and Access to Markets, Directorate-General Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, European Commission)

Report presentation:

Hugo Cuello Diaz (Researcher, IGL)

Panel discussion:

Román Arjona (Chief Economist, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, European Commission)
Silvana Sanfeliu Giaimo (Project Manager, Torino Wireless Foundation)
Harald Hochreiter (Strategy & Data Analysis, The Austrian Research Promotion Agency | FFG)