"Firm productivity is low in African countries, prompting governments to try a number of active policies to improve it. Yet despite the millions of dollars spent on these policies, we are far from a situation where we know whether many of them are yielding the desired payoffs. This paper establishes some basic facts about the number and heterogeneity of firms in different sub-Saharan African countries and discusses their implications for experimental and structural approaches towards trying to estimate firm policy impacts. It shows that the typical firm program such as a matching grant scheme or business training program involves only 100 to 300 firms, which are often very heterogeneous in terms of employment and sales levels. As a result, standard experimental designs will lack any power to detect reasonable sized treatment impacts, while structural models which assume common production technologies and few missing markets will be ill-suited to capture the key constraints firms face. Nevertheless, the author suggests a way forward which involves focusing on a more homogeneous sub-sample of firms and collecting a lot more data on them than is typically collected."

"Corporate venturing has gained much attention due to challenges and changes that occur because of discontinuous innovations - which seem to be promoted by digitalization. In this context, open innovation has become a promising tool for established companies to strengthen their innovation capabilities. While the external opening of the innovation process has gained much attention, the internal opening lacks on investigations. Especially new organizational forms, such as Internal Corporate Accelerators, have not been investigated sufficiently. This study, which is based on 13 interviews from two German tech-companies, contributes to a better understanding of this new form of corporate venturing and the resulting effects on the organizational renewal."

"Over the last six months, Nesta has been working with the Impact Management Project to explore how we think about evidence of impact. This document provides guidance on both using existing evidence of impact, and building your own evidence base."

Written by ANDE's Director of Research and Impact, this article gives an overview of why to measure impact, what to measure, how to collect data, and practical considerations for putting impact data into practice.

"This paper examines the relative importance of the caste system in explaining the resource misallocation in India and quantifies its impact on aggregate productivity. I document that the historically disadvantaged castes (LC) are less likely to enter entrepreneurship even though they are more productive on average. At the intensive margin, the LC entrepreneurs are less capital-intensive but have higher marginal revenue product of capital relative to high castes. In a quantitative model of entrepreneurship, I find that the LC face higher entry cost and stricter financial constraints and that such asymmetries reduce aggregate TFP by 2.54% and output by 6%."

"For the past two years I have been the chair of the research committee of a multi-country survey effort known as the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project, which has begun to make headway in understanding how different types of entrepreneurship affect development. The starting point has been to distinguish “necessity entrepreneurship,” which is having to become an entrepreneur because you have no better option, from “opportunity entrepreneurship,” which is an active choice to start a new enterprise based on the perception that an unexploited or underexploited business opportunity exists. Analyzing data gathered by GEM researchers in 11 countries, Atilla Varga and I have found that effects on economic growth and development of necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship vary greatly. We found that necessity entrepreneurship has no effect on economic development while opportunity entrepreneurship has a positive and significant effect.

Analyzing data gathered by GEM researchers in 11 countries, Atilla Varga and I have found that effects on economic growth and development of necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship vary greatly. We found that necessity entrepreneurship has no effect on economic development while opportunity entrepreneurship has a positive and significant effect."

"In emerging-market countries, commercial institutions do not always develop sufficiently quickly or effectively to support ambitious entrepreneurs. How might intermediaries remedy these problems? We address this question by drawing on institutional literatures to develop the concept of "open system intermediaries." Our research design involves examining business incubators in emerging markets as a form of open system intermediary. Empirically, we examine the relative emphasis that business incubators in emerging-market countries place on developing markets versus developing specific businesses. The study further examines how private, government, academic, and non- governmental organization sponsorship of incubators influences the mix of services that incubators provide. In sum, this work contributes to our understanding of how, why, and when intermediaries emerge to address institutional failures."

"Although early-stage finance is critical to the growth of most ventures, it is even more important for social ventures as they face the challenges of balancing their social and commercial objectives. Drawing on institutional logics and signaling theory, this study uses a panel data set of 3,401 nascent social ventures to investigate the important role philanthropic grant funding plays in the organizational and financial development of social ventures. We find mixed results, with positive effects on employment and subsequent access to debt finance, but no effects on revenues and access to equity. Our findings connect these theories by suggesting philanthropic grants provide social ventures with flexibility to invest in human capital without pushing them to pursue short-term financial objectives, and that receiving a philanthropic grant provides a signal that is interpreted differently by debt and equity financiers. These findings are especially relevant as funders increasingly use grants to support social entrepreneurship."

"Why is high-growth entrepreneurship scarce in developing countries? Does this scarcity reflect firm capabilities constraints? We explore these questions using as a laboratory an accelerator in Colombia that selects participants using scores from randomly assigned judges and offers them training, advice, and visibility but no cash. Exploiting exogenous differences in judges' scoring generosity, we show that alleviating constraints to firm capabilities unlocks innovative entrepreneurs' potential but does not transform subpar ideas into high-growth firms. The results demonstrate that some high-potential entrepreneurs in developing economies face firm capabilities constraints and accelerators can help identify these entrepreneurs and boost their growth."

"Almost all firms in developing countries have fewer than ten workers, with a modal size of one. Are there potential high-growth entrepreneurs, and can public policy help identify them and facilitate their growth? A large-scale national business plan competition in Nigeria provides evidence on these questions. Random assignment of US$34 million in grants provided each winner with approximately US$50,000. Surveys tracking applicants over five years show that winning leads to greater firm entry, more survival, higher profits and sales, and higher employment, including increases of over 20 percentage points in the likelihood of a firm having ten or more workers."