Theme
Capacity Development

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"We seek to show how evidence-based teaching for management affects the success of firms by way of changing managers’ actions. We conducted a randomized controlled field intervention with a sample of 100 small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. The intervention increased personal initiative behavior and entrepreneurial success over a 12-month period after the intervention. An increase in personal initiative behavior was responsible for the increase of entrepreneurial success (full mediation). Thus, the training led to an entrepreneurial mind-set and to an active approach toward entrepreneurial tasks. This particular management training was successful at improving knowledge and intangible skills that translated into successful organisational medium- to long-run outcomes for small businesses."

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"This study explores how the social entrepreneurship ecosystem can unite to develop an action plan on gender lens incubation and investing for enterprises focused on the low income market segment in India. It takes an international perspective with a geographical focus on India an emerging leader in innovation for the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) and is supported by examples of such innovative high impact, sustainable enterprises."

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"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."

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