"Impact investments are investments intended to create positive impact alongside financial return. Over the past few years, traditional investors have been increasingly interested by the nascent impact investment market and in 2010, the Global Impact Investing Network ("GIIN"), the Rockefeller Foundation and J.P. Morgan collaborated on a piece of research titled "Impact Investments: An Emerging Asset Class", which examined the market landscape, the characteristics of investments, and the size of potential investment opportunities.

This year, the GIIN and J.P. Morgan have partnered on an expanded survey, capturing data on over 2,200 private transactions totaling over USD 4bn of investment. In complement to this investment survey, we also surveyed investor views on investment philosophy and the overall development of the sector. The 2011 survey returned data from a broader and more geographically diverse pool of respondents. The questions explore returns, risk and impact measurement practices in more depth and also gauge general market perceptions."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Our new study builds on Dalberg's 2012 "Catalyzing Smallholder Agricultural Finance". It provides a sophisticated picture of how the smallholder finance space currently operates by describing the key actors and the nature of their interactions, and conceptualizing these in a new "industry model." The study identifies market frictions across the major components of the “industry model” that continue to inhibit smallholder farmers’ access to financial services and opportunities for removing them, and rallies sector actors around the need for more collective action than ever before."

"We are pleased to share with the impact community our review of 150 impact investing platforms, networks and organizations that promote, support or convene investors in the impact finance area. Prompted by our own experience as investors, technologists, and system designers, we were interested in better understanding prevailing business models and motivations for sharing (or hoarding!) data, innovations, and investors. Our analysis builds on ongoing work to design and develop an interoperable, global, modular, distributed, and democratic infrastructure for mobilizing data, innovations, and capital at the volume and velocity required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Our purpose, in addition to providing an overview of the platform landscape, is to identify opportunities for alignment of prospective partners, around the strategy, design and implementation for such global impact infrastructure; and explore scenarios for collective action."

"GAIN and partners, including the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Business Network (co-convened by the World Food Programme (WFP)), undertook a survey of food system SMEs in 17 countries in May 2020, aiming to assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated control measures on their businesses and their support needs."

"We study two interventions for underemployed youth across five Ethiopian sites: a $300 grant to spur self-employment, and a job offer to an industrial firm. Despite significant impacts on occupational choice, income, and health in the first year, after five years we see nearly complete convergence across all groups and outcomes. Shortrun increases in productivity and earnings from the grant dissipate as recipients exit their micro-enterprises. Adverse effects of factory work on health found after one year also appear to be temporary. These results suggest that one-time and one-dimensional interventions may struggle to overcome barriers to wage- or self-employment."

"Drawing on available academic literature and policy evaluation studies, the report aims to identify the impact of public support through equity instruments on firm performance, and puts forward main lessons on policy design and implementation. It employs a mixed- method approach based on evaluation synthesis (Edler at al. 2008)."

"Differences in management quality are an important contributor to productivity differences across countries. A key question is how to best improve poor management in developing countries. This paper tests two different approaches to improving management in Colombian auto parts firms. The first uses intensive and expensive one-on-one consulting, while the second draws on agricultural extension approaches to provide consulting to small groups of firms at approximately one-third of the cost of the individual approach. Both approaches lead to improvements in management practices of a similar magnitude (8-10 percentage points), so that the new group-based approach dominates on a cost-benefit basis. Moreover, the paper finds some evidence that the group-based intervention led to increases in firm size over the next three years, while the impacts on firm outcomes are smaller and statistically insignificant for the individual consulting. The results point to the potential of group-based approaches as a pathway to scaling up management improvements."