"While business accelerators remain understudied in the academic literature, there is growing interest in understanding how accelerators work and where they provide value to entrepreneurs. In this paper, we focus exactly on this question – we examine how mentorship and investor ties, two key aspects observed across accelerators in general lead to positive accelerator outcomes and through them, to longterm firm success outcomes for the start-ups participating in accelerators. Using the full cohort (n=105) of an international accelerator, we follow the progress of the startups during the accelerated period and continue to follow these startups for 15 months. We find that startups that participate more in mentorship events have higher likelihood of achieving short-term outcomes during the accelerator, such as the release of a prototype and generating revenue for the first time. Similarly, startups that develop more investor ties during the accelerator survive and raise capital at a higher rate. Finally, we find evidence that certain short-term accelerator outcomes also increase the chances of survival and investment. On the basis of these results, we provide practical implications for start-ups as well as managers of accelerator programs, in addition to theoretical contributions to entrepreneurship research."

"NTF4Ag: Emerging Lessons and New Frontiers brings together key results, insights from the case studies, pilots and crosscutting research conducted by MEDA and its partners over the last three years. The report is framed around INNOVATE's four learning themes, which emerged in an iterative manner from the research portfolio along with engagement with key stakeholders through events, conferences, and ongoing dialogue.

This report is aimed at a diverse set of actors in the smallholder finance landscape including the private sector, research organizations, implementing agencies, funders, and policymakers."

"This discussion paper builds on the results of the Conference Financing Global Development - Leveraging Impact Investing for the SDGs hosted by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in Berlin on 21st November 2017.

This paper shares the findings of the session. It aims to foster a conversation around impact measurement and management 2.0 and actively integrating impact incentivization in investment processes. The discussion focussed on how to incentivize the impact investing chain - those who provide capital, those who manage it, and those who receive it - to channel their efforts towards high impact SGBs and to provide adequate support for scaling impact."

"Esta publicación busca identificar y presentar las oportunidades de los Negocios Inclusivos como vehículo para acelerar el logro de los ODS por parte del sector privado, como agentes de cambio hacia el desarrollo sostenible en Colombia.

El documento hace parte de una serie de reportes desarrollados por la plataforma global Business Call to Action -BCtA, junto con socios locales en Colombia, Filipinas y Kenia para resaltar el potencial de mercado y de alineación con los ODS que los negocios Inclusivos tienen en diversos sectores."

"Em maio de 2020, a ANDE divulgou um estudo setorial, resumindo as evidências iniciais da primeira fase da crise, em março e abril de 2020, sobre o impacto do COVID-19 nas SGBs e no setor de suporte à SGB de maneira mais ampla nos mercados emergentes.

À medida em que a crise e seus efeitos no setor continuam se desenvolvendo, a ANDE está trabalhando para continuar atualizando as informações com novos dados e insights. Este adendo ao estudo apresenta novos dados coletados dos membros da ANDE, entre maio e junho de 2020, em relação às suas necessidades, ações que estão tomando e impressões atualizadas do impacto que a crise está tendo e terá no setor."

"Este estudo resume as evidências iniciais que surgiram durante a primeira fase da crise, em março e abril de 2020, em relação ao impacto da COVID-19 nas SGBs e no setor de apoio às SGBs nos mercados emergentes. Ele resume os riscos, impactos e necessidades atuais para que as organizações e indivíduos que apoiam as SGBs possam entender melhor o que está acontecendo localmente e, mais importante, tomar medidas para projetar e implementar intervenções mais eficazes."

"This book summarizes five years of learning from data collected as part of the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative. The authors present data describing impact-oriented ventures and accelerators that operate in both high-income countries and in emerging markets. Blending survey data with insights from sector experts, their various analyses shed light on the basic structure of accelerators, showing where they are having their most promising results.

Unlike previous studies, this book does not focus on a few high-profile accelerators (like TechStars and Y Combinator) and startups (like AirBnB and Uber). Instead, it compares a range of accelerator programs that target specific impact areas, challenging regions, and marginalized entrepreneurs. Therefore, it serves as a valuable tool for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners interested in the effectiveness of accelerator programs as tools that unleash the economic potential currently trapped in entrepreneurial dead spaces."

"As low-income countries industrialize, workers choose between informal self-employment and low-skill manufacturing. What do workers trade off, and what are the long run impacts of this occupational choice? Self-employment is thought to be volatile and risky, but to provide autonomy and flexibility. Industrial firms are criticized for poor wages and working conditions, but they could offer steady hours among other advantages. We worked with five Ethiopian industrial firms to randomize entry-level applicants to one of three treatment arms: an industrial job offer; a control group; or an "entrepreneurship" program of $300 plus business training. We followed the sample over a year. Industrial jobs offered more hours than the control group's informal opportunities, but had little impact on incomes due to lower wages. Most applicants quit the sector quickly, finding industrial jobs unpleasant and risky. Indeed, serious health problems rose one percentage point for every month of industrial work. Applicants seem to understand the risks, but took the industrial work temporarily while searching for better work. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurship program stimulated self-employment, raised earnings by 33%, provided steady work hours, and halved the likelihood of taking an industrial job in future. Overall, when the barriers to self-employment were relieved, applicants appear to have preferred entrepreneurial to industrial labor."

"Entrepreneurship is becoming an important source of economic activity and each time more sophisticated institutional arrangements (ecosystems) are populating more developed markets, as chances to grow fast and big in specific niches of those markets attract all necessary stakeholders for these ecosystems to work (entrepreneurs, investors, universities tech transfer offices, business accelerators, corporate and public procurers, etc.). In front of this, in less developed markets, some innovation agencies have been piloting opportunity driven startup programs, trying to cope with some of the barriers that these markets face so as to identify, select and give to potentially highly productive startups a real chance to succeed. This paper presents the results of an impact evaluation of one of those programs: Startup Peru."

"Organizational sponsorship mediates the relationship between new organizations and their environments by creating a resource-munificent context intended to increase survival rates among those new organizations. Existing theories are prone to treat such resource munificence as the inverse of resource dependence, indicating that the application of new resources in an entrepreneurial context should always benefit new firms. These existing theories, however, often overlook heterogeneity in both types of applied resources as well as founding environmental conditions. By attending to these nuances, we reveal that resource munificence is not necessarily predictive of organizational survival. We find that resource munificence related to sponsorship can potentially decrease or increase survival rates among new organizations and that these effects are contingent on fit of resource type with its respective geographic-based founding density. These findings confirm the need for a more-nuanced theory of sponsorship that attends to the mechanisms and conditions by which resource munificence is likely to alter new organization survival rates."