Theme
Acceleration

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"Small businesses significantly contribute to the economic development of a country. From purchasing groceries on an app to enabling new modes of learning, small businesses, especially start-ups, are transforming India into a technology-driven nation. This handbook is an endeavour to provide insight on several models that could be explored to set up a fund to promote start-ups, contributions to which would qualify as CSR spend under the Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"This whitepaper gathers the collective wisdom of the industry to formulate a first set of milestones and metrics. We strongly advocate that, in the near term, the framework illustrated in this document be used to evolve and institute a nationally accepted set of metrics and milestones for incubators in India. We also advocate that the funding organizations implement these metrics and milestones, not only to select the host partner but also to track, measure progress and to reward success. Some recommendations in this document may require policy review and modifications."

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"This report charts the rise of social venture incubation with a particular focus on what can be learned by this burgeoning sector from programmes around the world. It is intended for people and organisations wanting to support social ventures either as policymakers, investors or people running incubation programmes, to ensure that ventures have the best support."

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"Building on Nesta's 2014 Good Incubation report, this research draws on case studies to highlight strategies for good incubation in challenging environments. It focuses on weaker entrepreneurial ecosystems and offers advice to incubation managers and other ecosystem players, from policymakers to funders alike. Our report aims to support the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) in implementing Innovative Ventures and Technologies for Development (INVENT) by exploring how to do social incubation effectively in India’s low-income states. It draws on empirical evidence from around the world, over 30 interviews with incubator managers and experts in India, and UK best practice."

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"This paper analyzes the kind of knowledge that facilitates hatching and leveraging of technologies through the incubation process. Four corporate incubator types can be distinguished according to their source and type of technology: fast-profit incubators, market incubators, leveraging incubators, and in-sourcing incubators. Applying the knowledge-based view of the firm, four modes of mainly tacit knowledge were identified in respect to the different incubator types: (1) entrepreneurial knowledge, (2) organizational knowledge, (3) technological knowledge, and (4) complementary market knowledge. Knowledge strategies include both the leveraging of internal knowledge as well as the in-sourcing of external knowledge for the firm through the corporate incubator. The research is based on an analysis of a European Commission dataset from a benchmarking survey of 77 incubators as well as 52 interviews in 25 large technology-driven corporations in Europe and the United States."

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"The Gender Lens Incubation and Acceleration (GLIA) toolkit is an interactive resource, to guide accelerators and incubators (or 'intermediaries') through the journey of uncovering how our activities impact, and are experienced by, different gendered groups. This toolkit will equip us as intermediaries with the mindset, strategies, and frameworks to amend and improve both our organisation and program to increase accessibility and inclusivity of our work by all genders."

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"The GALI team consistently hears questions from accelerators and others in the field about financial sustainability. In this brief, we ask: How do accelerators fund their programs, and how do different funding profiles relate to different accelerator offerings?"

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