"In an effort to offer greater insight into the practice and utility of capacity building support, this report explores common forms of capacity-building support used by impact investors, many of which resemble forms of nonfinancial support historically leveraged by conventional investors. While both impact and conventional investors use capacity-building support to strengthen the underlying businesses of investee companies, impact investors also use it to enhance and extend their impact. This report outlines various needs that impact investors address through capacity-building support, the ways they structure and deliver such support, and funding strategies used for deploying such support."

"The objective of this research report is to help practitioners understand what systems change means in the context of social entrepreneurship, how it is distinct from direct service or “business-in-a-box” models and, most importantly, what it looks like in practice – not as lofty exhortations and abstract concepts, but as a set of concrete activities, processes, and leadership lessons. Our intent is to move beyond systems theories – which, while useful, can be difficult to apply in a practical context – and instead tell the stories of how these theories can be applied across a range of circumstances. These stories follow six for-profit and non-profit social entrepreneurs in the Schwab Foundation network, working in education, health, consumer rights, land rights, rural development and the informal economy, as their strategies evolved beyond organizational scale – growing the reach of a prescriptive, organizationally designed solution to a problem – to systemic scale, with the goal of shifting the rules, norms and values that make up social systems."

"The purpose of the Beyond the Binary project is to understand and articulate why corporate venturing should matter to corporations and how they might deploy their underutilized capital in pursuit of both profit and purpose. This will involve a deeper understanding of why some companies are holding this cash while others are spending it. It also involves telling the stories of those businesses who are successfully unlocking cash reserves by sharing first-hand accounts, through video interviews with the CV practitioners themselves. Ultimately, this project aims to create long-term impact by inspiring more corporations to allocate more of their capital towards corporate venturing activities which align with the SDGs."

"Investors and capacity development organizations have an opportunity to support women-led small and growing businesses, but they lack information. The purpose of this collaborative research project is to provide information to capacity developers and investors who want to better understand and address the barriers to growth for women-led small and growing businesses (WSGBs)."

"This report, the second in a collaboration between the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), outlines the latest trends in blended finance approaches in LDCs. It updates the previous 2018 report with the latest available data from the OECD, which now cover the six years from 2012 through 2017. It also features seven guest pieces by practitioners and experts working in the blended finance space, which showcase the opportunities and challenges of applying blended finance solutions in LDCs. The report concludes with a review of the next steps for the blended finance and development communities, and flags some emerging issues revealed in the report."

"The Incubator for Agribusiness and Agroindustry at Bogor Agricultural University, Indonesia (IAA-IPB) assists during three stages in the incubation process:early incubation (mentoring creative ideas, assisting in evaluation of market prospects, defining and outsourcing technology needs);incubation (helping production begin); and post-graduation (consulting on business plan revision and facilitating access to financial resources and a market network for new products and new technology implementation).

The utmost attention must be paid to incubatees during both the selection process and the incubation period, in order to ensure that they grow and are successful. Their success is the success of the incubator itself. One-to-one interaction with the incubatees is necessary to understand their problems and special needs and to help them find solutions. In addition, incubators are advised to maintain relations with successful graduates. They will continue to need assistance, they will be able to assist the incubator by being role models to new incubatees, and they represent a potential source of income for the incubator through profit sharing or equity investment."

"In this paper, we propose an overarching incubator model that synthesizes elements and best practices emanating from the five archetypes empirically identified and also incorporates substantially higher economies of scale and scope, as well as global and local (gloCal) knowledge arbitrage potential. This paper presents an architectural blueprint for designing a gloCal, real and virtual network of incubators (G-RVIN) as a knowledge and innovation infra-structure and infra-technology which would link entrepreneurs and micro-entrepreneurs with local, regional, and global networks of customers, suppliers and complementors and thus help not only bridge, but also leverage, the diverse divides (digital, knowledge, cultural, socio-political, etc.)."

"The study (i) reviews the definitions and concepts of social enterprises, (ii) outlines the landscape across 10 selected countries in Asia and Latin America, (iii) discusses challenges to scaling as faced by social enterprises, and (iv) presents suggestions for development banks to extend support to social enterprises through public and private sector investments. The study categorizes social enterprises and argues that the comparative advantage of development banks is to support selected social enterprises that are commercially bankable and have the base of the pyramid (BOP) at the core of their business operations. Development banks can support these enterprises-considered as the inclusive businesses of the future-through investing in impact funds and/or public sector loans."

"Impact-oriented accelerators, a relatively new type of entrepreneur support program, are proliferating as practitioners, philanthropic funders, and investors work to unlock the full potential of entrepreneurship-led economic development. These accelerators aspire to support entrepreneurs, in large part by driving investment into promising ventures that work in marginalized sectors and regions around the world. Given the opportunity costs of the human, organizational, and financial resources required to run accelerators, it is important to determine whether they are having this intended impact. To assess the effect of acceleration on outside equity investment, we analyze application and follow-up data from a matched sample of 1647 entrepreneurs who applied to 77 impact-oriented accelerators. Our main finding is promising. In the first follow-up year, accelerator program participants attract significantly more outside equity than their rejected counterparts. Further analysis suggests that this positive equity bump is not due to cherry picking obviously promising ventures during selection processes. Moreover, the effect is tied to the number of accelerated months in the follow-up year. Despite these promising observations, we find that the equity investment effect does not extend to ventures working in emerging markets, or to those with women on their founding teams. Thus, the benefits of accelerators for entrepreneurship-led development are not yet reaching the places and people that have the hardest time attracting capital on their own. We conclude the paper by outlining the challenges associated with extending the positive effects of acceleration into entrepreneurial domains that are most challenging from an economic development perspective."

"Inadequate sanitation negatively affects the lives of billions of people in the base of the pyramid (BoP) in the developing world, and has a particularly substantial impact on the well-being of millions of young children. Given the magnitude of the challenge and the limitations of existing approaches, enterprise-led approaches to providing public goods are generating growing interest. Emphasizing convergent innovation, enterprises targeting the BoP are presented as potentially sustainable and scalable interventions that generate positive poverty-alleviation effects. Yet our understanding of who is affected, and how, remains limited. To begin to address this gap, we apply a multidimensional framework to an urban-based, sanitation-oriented BoP enterprise, focusing on its poverty-alleviation effects on young children. Our analysis indicates that the enterprise's effects include changes in capability, economic, and relationship well-being and that these changes can be positive or negative. We also find that the impact varies depending on the role of the stakeholder in the business model and the age of the child. Our results contribute to a better understanding of how to assess the effectiveness of a sanitation intervention and how to evaluate the poverty-alleviation implications of an enterprise-led approach."