"This toolkit is designed to build an understanding of how adopting an experimental approach can be used to make policies more effective by successfully designing and delivering your own trials."
"What does it take to scale up the growth of green sectors? This study was initiated to shed light on the common challenges that have limited the scaling of green enterprises and the emergence of competitive green sectors in developing countries. It also aims to uncover and catalog emerging opportunities that offer potential for enabling the scale up of these sectors in ways that might not have been possible in the past due to lack of a technology platform, mature business model, or other emerging opportunity. Finally, the study offers key recommendations for donors, governments, development finance institutions (DFIs), and entrepreneurial supports organizations that support green enterprises and seek to scale green sectors in developing countries.
The study focuses on enterprises operating across five green sectors – climate-smart agriculture, renewable energy, solid waste management, drinking water purification and management, and wastewater management. Within these five sectors, the study takes a deeper dive into seven sub-sectors that provide an interesting mix of business models, some of which are scalable and replicable, offer insights for other subsectors, and highlight innovative responses to the common challenges that green sectors face. These sub-sectors are solar home systems (SHS), mini/micro grids, community water purification, drip irrigation systems, online platforms for waste management, e-waste management, and industrial wastewater management."
"This report highlights how traditional debt and equity financing structures often fail to adequately meet the needs of early-stage impact enterprises. It examines the pain points for both investors and entrepreneurs around traditional structures and the need for innovative instruments, provides examples of emerging and proven models, from revenue-based mezzanine debt to self-liquidating equity, and offers suggestions for concrete steps to advance the adoption of alternative structures to foster impact enterprises. 16 case studies from throughout Latin America aim to offer an overview of innovations both at the deal level and at the capital aggregation level, where holding companies and open-ended funds have proven to be potentially well suited for this space."
"This paper's aim is to describe two complementary approaches to mobile data management, in the hopes that these descriptions will both generate feedback from other organizations already engaged in similar efforts and be useful to organizations with similar goals and challenges. And whilst this paper describes the efforts of two impact investors we believe this work has implications beyond impact investing, including foundations, governments and NGOs."
"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."
"The purpose of the paper is to find the relationship between education and training and performance of women entrepreneurs (WEs). The present study found that entrepreneurial education stimulates women to take up entrepreneurship as a career option."