"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."
"Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is the buzz word that we hear in today's agriculture across the world. It deals with climate smart practices to be adopted in tune with the weather without foregoing sustainability and profitability. Various innovations and entrepreneurship pathways are described in the chapter with a main aim of promoting CSA especially among most vulnerable small holder farmers in South Asia."
"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."
"Root Capital is excited to release our first multi-site impact study - Improving Rural Livelihoods: A Study of Four Guatemalan Coffee Cooperatives. As a complement to our ongoing social and environmental due diligence, this comprehensive study provides a more detailed picture of the impacts that our client enterprises have on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and the environment. We also sought to answer the question: Does Root Capital's financing and training enable our clients to increase their impacts, and if so, how and to what extent?"
"To contribute to the debate with such context-specific knowledge and insights, NWO-WOTRO Science for Global Development commissioned a synthesis study. This study explored how a selection of research projects funded by the Food & Business (F&B) Research programme have directly or indirectly addressed key opportunities and constraints of sustainable inclusive business initiatives. The synthesis included 13 interdisciplinary research projects, which shared the long-term objective of contributing to improved food and nutrition security of marginalised and vulnerable groups. Based on this study, this paper presents new insights into the different business processes and innovations of, particularly, small-scale producers and entrepreneurs in the agri-business sectors of countries across sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia."
"This publication aims to provide insights into the why, how, and what of inclusive business to inspire companies that want to develop their own inclusive business model, and civil society and public partners facilitating include business in Africa. Hereto, the publication shares knowledge from both theory and practice and delves deeply into three inclusive business cases from East Africa: financial inclusion through mobile banking service M-Pesa in Kenya; Community Life Centres for inclusive healthcare in Kenya; and inclusive agribusiness and food security in Ethiopia. In addition, the publication presents insights from research on 2SCALE, an incubator programme that manages a portfolio of public-private partnerships. (PPPs) for inclusive business in agri-food sectors."
"The publication discusses the market potentials, constraints, and necessary policy instruments for an enabling environment for inclusive business. Included in the report are: a profile of inclusive business initiatives, the market size of the base of the pyramid, and an analysis of each inclusive business ecosystem in every Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economy. There is also a recommended a framework to guide future work on inclusive business under the APEC regional economic cooperation agenda."