"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."

"The purpose of this paper is to address the role of accelerators as authentic learning-based entrepreneurial training programs. Accelerators facilitate the development and assessment of entrepreneurial competencies in nascent entrepreneurs through the process of creating a start-up venture."

"This report sets out to establish how well social enterprise addresses gender inequality and women's empowerment in the UK. It is part of a series of reports commissioned by the British Council to look at the link between social enterprise and women's empowerment across five countries: Brazil, India, Pakistan, the UK and the USA. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of social enterprise as a mechanism for empowering women and considers different ways it is being used for this end. It also examines the idea that social enterprise as a business model might advance women's empowerment even when that is not a specific objective."

"The main focus of this study is to ascertain the impact of access to formal credit on enterprise performance. The study uses Nigerian Enterprise Surveys data for 2010 to construct a direct measure of credit constraint. From propensity score estimations, the results show that access to formal credit matters and has significant impact on enterprise performance indicators. Firms that are credit constrained have significantly lower output per worker, capital per worker, employment of labour and investment in fixed assets for expansion compared to firms that are not credit constrained. This is more pronounced for women-owned enterprises after adjusting for bias in the estimations and controlling for sampling weights. This suggests that one way to support the growth of enterprises in Nigeria is to make access to formal credit less stringent. Also, government and monetary authorities should support credit expansion policies for medium and small enterprises in Nigeria."

"Combining longitudinal venture-level data with qualitative insights from entrepreneurs, program managers, and investors, this report investigates similarities and differences between accelerator programs run in emerging markets compared to those run in high-income countries. Overall, we find that the two country contexts may not be as different as many people believe. When trying to stimulate the growth of promising ventures, the emerging market accelerator programs in our sample attract similar entrepreneurs and ventures and produce similar outcomes – accelerated revenue and employee growth and accelerated equity and debt investments. However, there are a few subtle but important differences."

"The Global Accelerator Learning Initiative collects information from entrepreneurs when they apply to accelerator programs. This report summarizes application data collected from ventures operating in Mexico that applied to participating accelerator programs between 2013 and early 2016."

"To understand the intermediary role of accelerators in the developing regional entrepreneurial ecosystem of Bangalore, we analyze data from 54 interviews with accelerator graduates, accelerator managers, and other ecosystem stakeholders, and from 49 websites, 13 online video interviews, 26 online news sources and 301 pages of policy documents. Specifically, we adopt a socially-situated entrepreneurial cognition approach to theorize how accelerator expertise, existing at a meso-level, intermediates between (micro-level) founders and the (macro-level). ecosystem. In our model, four types of accelerator expertise-connection, development, coordination, and selection-together increase stakeholders' commitment to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, leading to venture validation (success or failure) and ecosystem additionality. These findings indicate that accelerators contribute to ecosystems in a way that is distinct from, but supportive of, building individual ventures."

"What keeps social entrepreneurs in developing countries from growing their ventures? Around the world social entrepreneurs are creating innovative businesses that reduce poverty and improve the lives of their customers. These pioneers often encounter many hurdles along the way that make growing a social business a significant challenge. With insights from more than 120 interviews with early-stage social entrepreneurs in developing countries, we explore the common financial and non-financial obstacles they face. The survey showed that access to financing is still a major issue for most of the entrepreneurs: loans are expensive, require significant personal collateral and traditional financing providers don’t take the social mission of the business into account. Besides access to capital, especially in the missing middle, social entrepreneurs also have challenges finding new customers for their products and services, managing their operations and technical excellence, as well as recruiting and retaining high quality staff. Based on our findings we distilled specific conclusions and recommendations for entrepreneurs, investors and intermediaries."