So far, the PI and research team have:
1. developed the theoretical models, hypotheses and predictions about how the adoption of the scientific approach impact entrepreneurial decision making.
2. designed and conducted six Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) at six different locations around the world, leveraging on the following local partnering universities: a) Bocconi, Milan, Italy; b) RSM, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; c) Bayes, London, UK; d) UniAndes, Bogotà, Colombia; e) ESADE, Barcelona, Spain; f) MCC, Chennai, India). The RCTs follow the same, standardized experimental design with the except of the one in Chennai, India, where local conditions required to move from a 3-arm to a 2-arm experimental design. The RCTs were conducted between 2021 and early 2024 and are now completed in terms of execution of the intervention and data collection. Each RCT lasted on average 15 months.
3. Started to clean the data and organized the dataset;
4. Started to analyze the data;
5. Started to write papers.
Since the experimental design is the same and the experimental protocol standardized across five of the six locations, analyses are currently being conducted both at the disaggregated and aggregated level.
Preliminary to rolling out the RCTs at the six locations, the research team set up three sets of procedures regarding:
1. Ethics scrutiny and approval (all the RCTs have been approved by the relevant Ethical Committee and/or IRB or equivalent)
2. RCTs’ preregistration on the AEA RCT registry (AEARCTR-0008945)
3. Partnership agreements with the local institutions involved (including ethics, quality and safety standards, local staff selection and hiring, joint data controller agreements, etc.)
These procedures set the stage for smooth operations in terms of RCTs’ participants’ recruiting, instructors’ and RAs’ selection and training, experiment execution and data collection and management.
The research team designed all the research tools needed to successfully plan and implement the RCTs around the world. More specifically, the research team designed: 1) a global website (
https://www.ideaboosterlab.it/(öffnet in neuem Fenster)) and 6 specific websites (one for each Country, now discontinued) to issue the Call for Applications and proceed with participants’ recruiting; 2) the intervention which comprises different experimental treatments in the form of different versions of a 3 month-training program; the treatments comprise a variety of training materials in English and (where necessary) in the local language; 3) the research protocol which includes variables, measures, surveys, interview structures and coding schemes; 4) the local instructors’ and research assistants’ selection criteria and procedure; 5) the train-the-local instructor-program to train local instructors to administer the treatments at the six different locations; 6) the train-the-local research assistant-program to train local research assistants to collect the data from participants; 7) the procedures for experimental power calculation and randomization procedures; 8) the data collection and management procedures, including reliability tests; 9) the piloting of the intervention; 10) the data cleaning and management procedures.
All the documents are available upon request. The research team is currently cleaning and analyzing the data, as well as writing up the results in papers. It is also working on making the dataset from the six RCTs publicly available.
Overall, the research program has involved over eight hundred startups, a dozen researchers, eighteen instructors and over sixty research assistants around the world.
