To help corporations reap the benefits of collaborating with startups, Nesta has produced a guide along with Founders Intelligence and the Startup Europe Partnership. Their results show that companies of multiple sizes and representing multiple sectors can benefit from working with young, innovative firms. 

The guide seeks to:

• help executives and innovation managers understand what value working with startups can bring to their organization
• provide them with a three-step approach and framework to evaluate and select suitable programs to engage with startups
• empower those who want to champion startup engagement inside their company with case studies and stories that clearly illustrate the transformative benefits of collaborations. 

The guide is available for download on the Nesta website. 

I-DEV International, in conjunction with the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and Agora Partnerships, set out to evaluate the value created by impact incubators and accelerators for social enterprises and impact investors they seek to support. This 18-month analysis included over 100 interviews and surveys with stakeholders from 8 impact-focused incubator/accelerator programs, 54 enterprises that had participated in the incubator/accelerator programs analyzed, and 18 active impact investors. Key research objectives were to:

• Evaluate the quantifiable value created by impact-focused incubator/accelerator programs 
• Design and pilot a framework that can be used to objectively compare and benchmark impact incubator/accelerator programs against each other

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Economic inclusion refers to equality of opportunity for all members of society to participate in the economic life of their country as employers, entrepreneurs, consumers, and citizens. Fostering inclusion through active participation in the market economy involves increasing access to opportunity while generating additional economic growth. Effective strategies for inclusion engage under-represented groups in the design and implementation of policies and programs.

This article from the Center for International Private Enterprise illustrates ways to promote youth entrepreneurship and women’s entrepreneurship and to facilitate the inclusion of informal entrepreneurs in the formal economy.

Read the article here >>

Since 2013, the Impact of Entrepreneurship Database program has been working with partnering accelerators and entrepreneur support programs to collect detailed data from entrepreneurs during their application processes. These entrepreneurs are then resurveyed every six months to gather valuable follow-up data.

This report summarizes application data collected from entrepreneurs who applied to participating accelerator programs during 2013 and 2014. After setting aside duplicate application surveys, surveys with too much missing information, and surveys from entrepreneurs who declined to share their application information with the Impact of Entrepreneurship Database program, the observations in this 2014 Year-End Data Summary are based on 2,376 early-stage ventures.

You can find the publication here.  

The SPARK tracer survey on ‘Opportunities and Challenges to SME Development in Conflict Affected States’ was conducted in the summer of 2013 among 900 entrepreneurs in 9 countries. The survey was conducted in order to learn more about the effectiveness of SPARK’s small and medium enterprise interventions.

Two main findings of the survey show that existing businesses are better at creating jobs than start-ups and that young people create fewer jobs on average than other businesses. The survey also identifies 5 important business barriers experienced by the participating entrepreneurs.

Please read the attached survey for further details