"Asia is facing simultaneously huge growth potential and increasing inequalities, with often weak national solutions to the social issues at hand. Social purpose organisations (SPOs) – which includes but are not limited to non-profit organisations, charities and social enterprises - are seen to solve these issues sustainably. Social incubation is seen as a tool to help SPOs grow and potentially build a pipeline for social investors. Yet, how does social incubation in Asia work? The insights presented here are the first insights from surveying 15 social incubators in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore which have existed for at least two years."

"The present "Effectiveness of Entrepreneurship Development interventions on Women Entrepreneurs" issue brief is the result of an in-depth review of six meta-evaluations and twenty three rigorous impact satudies undertaken during the past 10 years in women's entrepreneurship development initiatives around the world. It provides a synthesis of impact findings and identifies interventions which seem to have worked more effectively.

The brief corroborates for example that combining finance and business training -although more costly - seems to be more effective in supporting women's business start-up than either finance or business training alone. Also, training packages that combine business and gender knowledge are more likely to lead to women's empowerment. While more evidence is still needed, the brief concludes with a series of recommendations for future interventions and impact evaluations including providing more than access to skills and finance, by also addressing gender-based barriers and women's strategic needs, in order to ensure the business success and consolidation of women entrepreneurs."

"Grants for agricultural innovation are common but grant funds specifically targeted to smallholder farmers remain relatively rare. Nevertheless, they are receiving increasing recognition as a promising venue for agricultural innovation. They stimulate smallholders to experiment with improved practices, to become proactive and to engage with research and extension providers. The systematic review covered three modalities of disbursing these grants to smallholder farmers and their organisations: vouchers, competitive grants and farmer-led innovation support funds. The synthesis covers, among others, innovation grant systems in Malawi (Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme), Latin America (several Challenge Funds for Farmer Groups), Uganda (National Agricultural Advisory Services ), and Colombia (Local Agricultural Research Committees - CIAL)."

"Many organizations around the world implement programs designed to encourage entrepreneurship, including grant prize awards, accelerator programs, incubators, etc. The goal of these programs is to supply entrepreneurs with early-stage support and visibility to help develop ideas and attract capital; but, if capital markets are efficient, good business ideas should find funding anyways. In this paper, I present evidence from the first global- scale, quasi-experimental study of whether entrepreneurship programs improve outcomes for start-up firms. I employ a regression discontinuity design to test whether winners of start- up program competitions perform better ex-post than losers, where the threshold rank for winning the competition provides exogenous variation in program participation. With 460 competitions across 113 countries and over 20,000 competing firms, I find that winning a competitions increases the probability of firm survival by 64%, the total amount of follow-on financing by $260,000 USD, and total employment by 47%, as well as other web-based metrics of firm success. Impacts are driven by medium-size prize competitions, and are precisely estimated both in countries where the costs of starting a business are low and where these costs are high. These results suggest that capital market frictions indeed prohibit start-up growth in many parts of the world."

"Recent research has suggested that the reduction of entry regulation can promote firm entry and job creation, but little is known about the quality of firms and jobs created through these reforms. To shed light on this question, we employ data from Portugal, a country which implemented one of the most dramatic and thorough policies of entry deregulation in the industrialized world. The impact of these major changes can be traced with a matched employer-employee database that provides unusually rich information on the quality of founders and employees associated with the new firms.

Our assessment indicates that the short term consequences of the reform were just as one would predict with a standard economic model of entrepreneurship: The reform resulted in increased firm formation and employment, but mostly among "marginal firms" that would have been most readily deterred by existing heavy entry regulations. These marginal firms were typically small, owned by relatively poorly-educated entrepreneurs, operating in the low-tech sector (agriculture, construction, and retail trade). These firms were also less likely to survive their first two years than comparable firms that entered prior to the reform. The social impact of entry deregulation may be limited by the quality of the firms it creates."

"Most employment in low and middle income countries is in micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises, governments, non-governmental organizations and donors spend on targeted programs and broader policies to enhance employment creation in these firms. But despite these efforts, not much is known about which of these interventions are really effective. This systematic review synthesizes the existing evidence on the employment impact of these programs. The results show that the effects have so far been very modest."

"Do networks plentiful in ideas provide early stage startups with performance advantages? On the one hand, network positions that provide access to a multitude of ideas are thought to increase team performance. On the other hand, research on network formation argues that such positional advantages should be fleeting as entrepreneurs strategically compete over the most valuable network positions.

Beyond providing causal evidence for the durability of network based performance advantages, these findings provide micro-level support to the importance of knowledge spillovers within bootcamps, accelerators, and startup ecosystems more generally."

"Donors are engaging directly with the private sector, as partners in development. This represents a major shift in mode of operation, relative to the more traditional, bilateral model. One particular area of interest is how business form, governance and ownership influence social outcomes, a theme that has not received much attention until now. This Briefing Note explores why form, governance and ownership matter, and reviews the evidence that they can influence outcomes for the poor. It is intended to support donors in enhancing the impact of future programming choices, when engaging with business. It is based on research and practical examples from both developed and developing countries, and is a joint initiative of Oxfam and DCED."

"The digital context of equity crowdfunding broadens and diversifies the pool of potential investors and is thus touted as a means to democratize access to capital for non-traditional innovators. It is unclear whether such democratization also applies to user entrepreneurs. User innovators are consumers who create products with the goal of serving their own unmet needs; if they subsequently pursue entrepreneurship as a means to commercialize their innovations they become user entrepreneurs. Importantly, user innovators are significant contributors to consumer product innovation. In contrast, traditional entrepreneurs, also called producer entrepreneurs, create products with the goal of profiting from them. We examine whether investors in equity crowdfunding respond differently to user entrepreneurs relative to traditional producer entrepreneurs, and explore heterogeneity in investor responses. Through a randomized field experiment, we find that less experienced investors are more receptive to user innovators than investors with more experience. Experienced investors are significantly less interested in ventures by user innovators, relative to those by producer innovators, likely due to experienced investors' concern about the ability of user entrepreneurs to commercialize their ideas. Consequently, the democratization of access to capital for user entrepreneurs comes from less experienced investors who are often inaccessible in traditional investment settings."

"Does growth training help entrepreneurs to scale-up new ventures? Our field experiment answering this question uses a sample of 181 startup founders from the population of Singapore-based entrepreneurs in 2017. The treatment consisted of classroom sessions conducted in workshop and lecture formats that provided content in growth-catalyst tools comprising of effective business model design, building effective venture management teams and leveraging personal networks, that help in entrepreneurial resource mobilization. Also, participants received individualized business coaching addressing their venture's issues and challenges in these domains. Our results show that entrepreneurs that received training in the three growth-catalyst tools achieved higher sales and employee growth for their ventures. In addition, entrepreneurs with higher educational attainment, higher prior work experience and higher growth goals benefited much more from the training intervention."