"Aimed at investors and other development practitioners, this toolkit highlights the potential of using finance to impact and empower adolescent girls and young women in emerging markets. The toolkit is based on the work of SPRING and four years of experience in running its accelerator for girls and young women impact ventures in East Africa and South Asia."

"This report is based upon discussions that took place during the webinar “Farmer and FInance: The Widening Gap”, which focused on the challenges and opportunities smallholder farmers face in accessing finance. The event was a virtual roundtable discussion with the participation of companies that work with smallholder farmers. Beyond financing, this report examines other challenges in working with smallholders who are part of large-scale agricultural value chains, based on the outcomes of the event and individual interviews with Business Call to Action member companies."

"Innovative financing is the manifestation of two important trends in international development: an increased focus on programs that deliver results and a desire to support collaboration between the public and private sector. This report aims to accelerate the growth of innovative finance by creating a common language and vision for leaders in both the public and private sector to use as they explore innovative financing opportunities."

"Impact investments are investments intended to create positive impact alongside financial return. Over the past few years, traditional investors have been increasingly interested by the nascent impact investment market and in 2010, the Global Impact Investing Network ("GIIN"), the Rockefeller Foundation and J.P. Morgan collaborated on a piece of research titled "Impact Investments: An Emerging Asset Class", which examined the market landscape, the characteristics of investments, and the size of potential investment opportunities.

This year, the GIIN and J.P. Morgan have partnered on an expanded survey, capturing data on over 2,200 private transactions totaling over USD 4bn of investment. In complement to this investment survey, we also surveyed investor views on investment philosophy and the overall development of the sector. The 2011 survey returned data from a broader and more geographically diverse pool of respondents. The questions explore returns, risk and impact measurement practices in more depth and also gauge general market perceptions."

"This study conducts a comparative analysis of social enterprise intermediaries in China and India to better understand how they legitimize social enterprises in new settings. To address theoretical weakness in this sphere, it combines several institutional theories to capture disruptions created by institutional innovation and also legitimizing processes. Drawing on data collected from surveys, interviews, and websites in each country, it finds that intermediaries mitigate negative and leverage positive influences of external institutions though their strategies vary due to country differences in institutional pressures. This information is key to building intermediaries' capacity to institutionalize social enterprises as new institutional actors."

"The Government has put high-growth, innovative businesses at the heart of its economic agenda, and is focusing policy on how to back the big businesses of tomorrow. The aim of this research was to provide: "a thorough and focused literature review on business incubation." The purpose of which was to identify models of incubation that have the greatest impact on the mission of building high-growth, innovative firms."

"A growing wave of co-location programmes promises to boost growth for entrepreneurs and young firms. Despite great public and policy interest we have little idea whether such programmes are effective. This paper categorises accelerators and incubators within a larger family of co-location interventions. We then develop a single framework to theorise workspace-level impacts. We summarise available evaluation evidence and sketch implications for regional economic policy. We find clear evidence programmes are effective overall. But we know little about how effects operate - or who benefits. Providers and policymakers should experiment further to establish optimal designs."

"Our new study builds on Dalberg's 2012 "Catalyzing Smallholder Agricultural Finance". It provides a sophisticated picture of how the smallholder finance space currently operates by describing the key actors and the nature of their interactions, and conceptualizing these in a new "industry model." The study identifies market frictions across the major components of the “industry model” that continue to inhibit smallholder farmers’ access to financial services and opportunities for removing them, and rallies sector actors around the need for more collective action than ever before."

"We mailed brochures to 10,000 randomly chosen employed German workers eligible for a subsidized occupational training program called WeGebAU, informing them about the importance of skill-upgrading occupational training in general and about WeGebAU in particular. Using survey and register data, we estimate effects of the information treatment brochure on awareness of the program, on take-up of WeGebAU and other training, and on subsequent employment. The brochure more than doubles awareness of the program. There are no effects on WeGebAU take-up but participation in other (unsubsidized) training increases among employees aged below 45. Short-term labor market outcomes are not affected."

"This study creates a taxonomy of startup assistance organizations and provides a working definition of an innovation accelerator that departs from those found in the existing literature. Previous definitions have highlighted accelerators' services and focus on software applications as key characteristics of the definition. The proposed taxonomy distinguishes accelerators from other startup assistance organizations based on the organization's value proposition and business model, both of which are influenced significantly by the accelerator's technology focus and the founder's motivation for starting. Through this taxonomy, three categories of startup assistance organizations are identified: (1) incubators and venture development organizations, (2) proof-of-concept centers, and (3) accelerators. Accelerators are further subdivided into social accelerators, university accelerators, corporate accelerators, and innovation accelerators."