"This paper argues that the time is right for banks to step up their efforts to serve micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in emerging markets. There are three reasons for our optimism. First, an estimated 60 per cent of global banking revenue growth over the next decade will lie in emerging markets. Second, more and more banks in emerging markets are finding ways to overcome the difficulties of serving the important MSME segment. Third, innovations in technology, risk assessment and business models are increasingly facilitating their effort. It is not just banks in emerging markets that should grab the opportunity. Western banks will find innovative practices that they can use to refresh and adapt their traditional banking models back home."

"The puzzle for policy-makers, or others interested in a specific 'place' or region, is that this phenomenon - especially of 'innovation-driven entrepreneurship' - is not only highly concentrated but also seems to be characterized by a positive reinforcing cycle of growth, once IDEs reach a particular concentration (Audrestch & Feldman 2004). The systems-like behavior of these places has knock-on consequences, both for the regions in which it takes place, but also for those localities that have not crossed the threshold for accelerated growth (or at least not at the same rate). The logic of 'co-location', with growing networks of exchange and the consequent 'network effects,' means that the successful regions (and nations) may end up continually doing better, while those less successful ones get left further and further behind. As Audrestch & Feldman described, "geography has been found to provide a platform upon which new knowledge can be produced, harnessed and commercialized into innovations" (2004, p.31)."

MIT's study of these phenomena tries to address this puzzle, and provide advice and options for those who wish to optimize innovation-driven entrepreneurship in their specific regions, and who seek to build a vibrant innovation ecosystem in their locality. A key to MIT's approach is a Stakeholder Framework (which will be the subject of this Working Paper), but it is important to first place this in context."

"Entrepreneurs are key actors in the transformation of low-income societies characterized by low productivity and often subsistence self-employment into dynamic economies characterized by innovation and a rising number of well-remunerated workers. To the extent that causal links from entrepreneurship to productivity growth are at work, there is room for using policy levers to quicken the development process by improving the incentives and supportive institutions that facilitate innovation by entrepreneurs. These analytical and policy issues motivate this report, which explores the challenges faced by potential high-growth, transformational entrepreneurs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)."

"What is the effect of exposing motivated youth to firm management in practice? To answer this question, we place young professionals for one month in established firms to shadow middle managers. Using random assignment into program participation, we find positive average effects on wage employment, but no average effect on the likelihood of self-employment. Within the treatment group, we match individuals and firms in batches using a deferred-acceptance algorithm. We show how this allows us to identify heterogeneous treatment effects by firm and intern. We find striking heterogeneity in self-employment effects, but almost no heterogeneity in wage employment. Estimates of marginal treatment effects (MTE) are then used to simulate counterfactual mechanism design. We find that some assignment mechanisms substantially outperform random matching in generating employment and income effects. These results demonstrate the importance of treatment heterogeneity for the design of field experiments and the role of matching algorithms in intervention design."

"The start-ups with the most potential to innovate and generate employment are the ones most likely to rely on capital provided by outside investors. Several institutional developments including the rise of business accelerators, angel groups, and startup competitions, have meant that founders seeking this type of capital increasingly pitch their business ideas to investors in group settings, raising the question of whether the order in which ideas are pitched affects outcomes. Research on order effects in other competitive environments indicates that judges often have high expectations and calibrate their evaluations to the lower average performance of competitors at the beginning of competition, making it difficult for those going early to do as well as those performing later. We test empirically whether this calibration effect is also present for efforts by founders to pitch investors by conducting a field experiment. Entrepreneurs participating in elevator pitch competitions were randomly assigned the position in which they pitched. We find evidence of this calibration effect: investor-judges expressed substantially lesser interest in pursuing investment in the first and second ventures pitched to them."

"The World Economic Forum is pleased to release Leveraging Entrepreneurial Ambition and Innovation: A Global Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Competitiveness and Development, which examines the relationship of entrepreneurship and competitiveness from a fresh perspective. The report builds on and advances our extensive previous work on this issue. The study described in this report combines two unique data sets, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index data, which ranks the economic competitiveness of 144 economies, and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s assessment of entrepreneurial activity across 70 economies."

"In this study, we evaluate the effect of innovation promotion programs administrated by the Colombian Innovation Agency (COLCIENCIAS). The evaluation focuses on programs that provide financial incentives for research and development (R&D)-matching grants and contingent loans-and encourage the formation of linkages among firms, universities, and other public research organizations. We use longitudinal firm-level data and adopt a fixed effects identification strategy to control for potential selection biases. The findings show that COLCIENCIAS financial incentives have increased labor productivity as a result of gains in total factor productivity (TFP) due to product diversification and, to a lesser extent, of capital intensification."

"This report is part of a wider study that aims to unpack the contribution of Gender Lens Investing in women’s economic empowerment, and builds on the existing literature on the understanding of the finance gap for women-owned enterprises in developing countries. It is based on insights gathered from 200+ women entrepreneurs across Kenya, Rwanda, India and Indonesia. While analysing the factors affecting access to finance for women entrepreneurs, the report touches upon its effect on their lives in terms of impact on their agency, bargaining power, ability to challenge patriarchal attitudes, and financial independence, through examples. The report posits a segmentation framework to bring out the differentiated characteristics, needs and challenges of women-owned businesses businesses."

"We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from factories, to years before the factories arrive close to some villages, and to the marriage and enrollment decisions of their male siblings. Girls exposed to the garment sector delay marriage and childbirth. This stems from (a) young girls becoming more likely to be enrolled in school after garment jobs (which reward literacy and numeracy) arrive, and (b) older girls becoming more likely to be employed outside the home in garment-proximate villages. The demand for education generated through manufacturing growth appears to have a much larger effect on female educational attainment compared to a large-scale government conditional cash transfer program to encourage female schooling."

"Nos últimos 10 anos do investimento de impacto no Brasil, temos observado um desenvolvimento significativo do tema. Este estudo do setor no Brasil revela um significativo crescimento do mercado. Dezenove dos maiores investidores de impacto brasileiros pesquisados, incluindo gestores de fundos, bancos, fundações, empresas familiares e outros, esperam dedicar 40% a 50% mais capital ao investimento de impacto em 2014, em comparação com 2013."