"Innovative start-ups are often considered to be a key source of innovation and job creation. As such they are the subject of several types of supportive public policies. This study examines the short-term and long-term effects of business incubators on the performance of innovative start-ups in terms of sales revenues and job creation. A large sample of N-¯=-¯2544 innovative Italian start-ups, of which 606 were incubated, was followed over a period of up to six years. Tobit and Poisson regressions and propensity-score matching analyses point towards a significant negative effect of incubator tenancy on sales revenues and no significant effect of incubation on job creation. Findings also suggest that the initially negative effect of incubation on sales revenues turns into a positive effect in the long term. The effects of incubator characteristics, in terms of ownership, certification, and size on the growth of tenant start-ups were further analysed, but these effects were found to be negligible. The study contributes to the literature on the evidence-based evaluation of business incubation performance. It suggests that public policy makers should lower their expectations regarding the numbers of new jobs created by business incubation support."

"The objective of this paper is to understand the mechanisms by which development projects facilitate market linkage of smallholder farmers based on panel data from Nicaragua. We find that activities related to entrepreneurial practices have positive and statistically significant effect on commercialization. We also find that increased commercialization is positively correlated with total bean sales income, suggesting a positive indirect effect of the activities. Other activities demonstrate no positive and robust effect on commercialization while direct positive effects on sales income can be observed. This implies that market linkage of smallholder farmers require different sets of intervention tools than traditional farm technical assistance."

"Whether differences among accelerators explain differences in the performance of member ventures is an important and underexplored question. Conversely, are the effects of accelerators so isomorphic, because they copy each other, that ventures from different accelerators report little performance differences? We use variance decomposition analysis to test whether variations in characteristics of accelerators explain performance differences in the ventures that belong to them. Using a sample of 1,442 ventures from 117 accelerator programs across 22 countries, we find that 11.13–14.18% variance of venture performance can be attributed to accelerator membership. Accelerator membership also accounted for 3.00, 5.15, and 16.65% in the variance for employee growth, employee costs, and revenue change, respectively. Our findings suggest that between accelerator differences can make a significant economic difference to venture performance."

"Creating Markets has been part of the World Bank Group's development agenda for at least the last 15 years. The 2002 World Bank Group's Private Sector Development Strategy, for example, identified the ingredients for market creation, including sound rules, the expectation that such rules be adhered to, and physical access to markets. Because of IFC's and the Bank Group's long history supporting market creation in its client countries, the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) has identified many lessons of experience in recent evaluations that are relevant to such efforts.

As the IFC implements its new corporate strategy, the rationale for this evaluation is to share those lessons of experience and add to them with findings from a set of purposefully selected case studies across sectors and countries at different stages of development."

"This report analyzes the entrepreneurial journey of women in Mexico. It was undertaken in order to identify opportunities for creating an enabling environment for women through increased access to finance, skill development and public resources; unleashing their potential to contribute towards economic growth.

The study draws on the experiences of 126 women entrepreneurs and data collected from them through focus groups and surveys. It also draws on the expertise of a group of actors referred to as the “ecosystem” for supporting WSGBs in Mexico. This “ecosystem” includes: public policy entities and academia, financial institutions, capacity development organizations and networks, and nongovernmental organizations and foundations, as well as the private sector. These actors are “mapped” in order to visualize which organizations in Mexico are supporting WSGBs, as well as those that take a collaborative approach to include more women in the sector."

"This report reflects a combination of on-the-ground experiences of China Impact Fund (CIF) and New Ventures China (NVC), and points of view from emerging impact investing practitioners active in mainland China. It aims to consider the important but often overlooked role of impact investing in the potential transformation of China's society over the coming decades, especially on the environmental front."

"Rabobank Foundation, AgriProFocus and ICCO Cooperation offer support to agri-food SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa in overcoming some of the most important hurdles to growth and development...The study increases our understanding of the challenges faced by agri-food SMEs as well as those faced by investors and capital funds operating in Sub-Saharan Africa. We trust that this report challenges regulators, donors and potential investors to come up with novel approaches for making critical capital available to agri-food SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa."

"This paper examines the sparse but rapidly growing literature on Business (and Seed) Accelerators. It summarises the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that have been identified by academic authors, and matches each factor to operational and strategic activity within an Accelerator and to theoretical arguments for and against their importance. The aim is to match CSFs with literature from a wider range of disciplines, particularly psychology, sociology, economics, leadership and learning. These each help explain, justify, inform and give a theoretical context to the documented CSFs. The background models, once identified, are useful tools in the planning and analysis of Accelerators."

"In recent years, accelerator programs experienced substantial growth, becoming an important part of the entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. New ventures that want to participate in such programs must go through a multi-stage and highly competitive process, with only one out of ten applicants being successful. However, our knowledge with regards to the factors that drive the decisions of accelerator programs is limited, and empirical research on this topic is scarce. We hypothesise that the national culture of the founding team can play an important role as a proxy for the unobservable values and the behaviour of the venture founders, and we examine the impact of cultural diversity on the probability of being admitted into an accelerator program. The results show that diversity enhances the probability of being selected. This finding is robust across several specifications, and while accounting for the potential endogeneity of cultural diversity."

"This issue brief, part of a series published by ANDE in 2019, is designed to create a common knowledge base from which the Small and Growing Business (SGB) sector can work in the hopes of advancing towards selected development goals. This brief explains how SGB support organizations can help achieve SDG 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth, through the examination of SGBs as job creators in emerging markets, SGBs as drivers of economic growth in emerging markets, and SGBs and the changing nature of work."