Our successful entrepreneurship portfolio is based on four key pillars: Careful adaptation for Small Business Owners We recognize that entrepreneurs face different opportunities and challenges depending on a variety of dimensions including their particular context, gender, age, stage in their growth cycle and personal appetite for growth.
Market-driven approach for small business owners We support entrepreneurs to find markets with untapped demand opportunities to build their growth strategies and encourage them to test and capture these opportunities as quickly and affordably as possible. Effective capacity development Recognizing that the entrepreneurs we support are busy, hardworking individuals, we aim to efficiently provide the most relevant and effective trainings. Rigorous measurement and continuous learning We currently implement nearly 30 enterprise development programs in more than 20 countries, which provide an excellent base of data and learning.
Featured Entrepreneurship Projects FED Zambia: Food processors creating employment, boosting nutrition, and generating economic opportunities for women in Zambia FED Zambia: Food processors creating employment, boosting nutrition, and generating economic opportunities for women in Zambia Context: Food processing companies that mill flour, pasteurize dairy products, press cooking oils, and make other food products are vital….
Creating job opportunities in South African mining communities TechnoServe is collaborating with Anglo American on providing enterprise development training to youth in response to South Africa's national priority of reducing unemployment and poverty. Boosting Nutrition and Opportunity in Africa The inability to access safe, nutritious, and affordable food is a problem for many people across East and Southern Africa, leading to widespread malnutrition in children.
Who Benefits Entrepreneurs Training entrepreneurs in business skills and connecting them to better financing and markets helps them earn reliable incomes for the long term. Local consumers Small businesses provide important goods and services to underserved populations in the developing world.
Women and youth Entrepreneurship provides women and young people in particular with opportunities to earn their own incomes. Quiz: Food Processing vs. September 29, Small business owners in Chile Learn how we help these entrepreneurs build the skills and confidence they need to grow their businesses.
English PDF. French PDF. Load More Resources. Support Our Work Your support fuels our mission. Make A Difference. Despite its success the Valley was formed by a unique set of circumstances and any attempt to replicate it in other places were unlikely to succeed.
This led to a second prescription, which was to build the ecosystem on local conditions. Grow existing industries and build on their foundations, skills and capabilities rather than attempting to launch high-tech industries from scratch.
The third prescription was the importance of engaging the private sector from the start. Here the role of government is indirect and one of a facilitator not a manager. This is the opportunity for local success stories to become role models for others. However, care must be taken by governments not to try to pick winners or over engineer the system.
High growth firms by nature are inherently risky and highly innovative firms are typically unique. As such there is no magic formula for their success. This can take the form of government grants and venture capital funds that are too easily obtained.
What is important is to grow firms with strong root systems that can sustain their own growth as much as possible before seeking additional funding. Such firms should be financially sound; profitable and well managed, or their likely success rates will be low. The focus should be on encouraging sustainable, growth oriented and innovative firms not simply fostering more start-ups.
Starting a new business is the easy part, successfully growing it is the challenge. The challenge for government policy is to develop policies that work, but avoid the temptation to try to effect change via direct intervention. A study of entrepreneurial ecosystems undertaken by Colin Mason from the University of Glasgow and Ross Brown from the University of St Andrews for the OECD, developed a set of general principles for government policy in the relation to these ecosystems.
Such programs are essentially transactional in nature. Banks, community development corporations CDCs and other community development financial institutions CDFIs are all in a position to offer loans to small businesses that are starting out.
Other organizations in your community may also be able to offer grants to new businesses. Offer business development classes at local colleges and community education programs. One-on-one business counselor can also be a beneficial option for entrepreneurs to utilize. Designate a Saturday summer and fall are great times for this to encourage patronage of local businesses. This could include outdoor music, food stands, and other fun activities, or it could simply be a day when you invite people to check out their local businesses.
Some businesses may choose to offer special discounts on this day. Make sure to advertise the event around your town. This is a great way to promote existing businesses to your town, as well as attract customers who may be visiting your community.
Another way to get organized is to develop a small business association or chamber of commerce to help local businesses work together and promote their interests. Programs such as One Million Cups , Business After Hours and Start-up Drinks are great ways to help entrepreneurs network, share and be inspired by one another.
Pick one of these 9 steps -- big or small -- and get started growing the small business community in your town. Jason Schaefer contributed content for this article. Top photo by Johnny Sanphillippo. Success in entrepreneurship and innovation—which are about new products or services—is uncertain. Thus if intellectual property rights are not adequately enforced, this adds to the uncertainty, which can build up to prohibitively high levels that discourage any potential innovators.
Corruption may make entrepreneurs unwilling to trust the institutions that are necessary to protect intellectual property rights. Not enough is known about the differences in innovation between entrepreneurs and large often multinational firms. While entrepreneurs are hailed as the source of radical innovations, it may well be that large firms, which can make huge investments in research and development, are the real innovators.
Both parties undoubtedly contribute to innovation, but whether they complement each other is still unknown. Further empirical analysis is also needed of the relationship between entrepreneurial firms and economic growth rates. Only further study can answer this question. There is also inadequate understanding of the kind of economic environment that influences innovative entrepreneurs not only to start their businesses, but also to expand them. This is an important issue since the quality of start-ups— their persistence, growth rate, and innovation— influences their effect on the economy.
And we do not know enough about failure rates. About half of all businesses close in their first five years. Yet recent research finds that survival rates could be higher. It is not yet clear whether innovative entrepreneurs survive more often than noninnovative entrepreneurs. Research preceding that reported here found the opposite to be the case. Entrepreneurship is considered crucial to a dynamic economy.
Entrepreneurs create employment opportunities not only for themselves but for others as well. Realizing these advantages requires institutions that contribute to an environment that is friendly to entrepreneurs. In particular, it is important to protect intellectual and other property rights, streamline and enforce commercial laws, improve the business climate, reduce regulatory burdens, and create a culture of second chances for entrepreneurs who fail.
More specifically, the following policy measures should be considered:. Protecting material property rights ensures that any wealth creation stays with the entrepreneur, while protecting intellectual property rights fosters entrepreneurship and innovation.
Bureaucratic obstacles constrain innovation-driven activities in many economies. Entrepreneurial opportunities will be greater in deregulated economies with freely operating markets and efficient licensing, because entrepreneurs can operate flexibly and their entrepreneurial activities can respond to changes in the market. It is also important that laws and regulations be enforced fairly and evenly. Administrative burdens for start-ups need to be low, including the time needed to register a business, the number of bureaucratic steps, and the number of regulations, fees, and reporting requirements.
As a benchmark, leading business-friendly countries enable companies to register for business within one day, without the need for regular renewal. This can be achieved by setting up a state-of-the-art online e-administration for all standard businesses.
Conflicting legislation creates uncertainty, and uncertainty discourages business activity. Codification means bringing all amendments to a given law, adopted at different times, into a single legal code.
Swift and comprehensive codification of the legislation eliminates contradictions. It should also include reducing and unifying administrative procedures relating to a particular activity. In many countries, a single failed business effort brands a person for life as a loser.
The opposite experience in the US, where entrepreneurs are more readily given a second chance, even following a bankruptcy, makes clear that destigmatizing failure is crucial to the development of a rich entrepreneurial culture. Creating such a culture also reduces the fear of failure, which is still the most important impediment to entrepreneurship. The negative effects of layoffs in firms that are unable to compete can be eased by improving search options for new jobs and by supporting vocational training for workers who lost their jobs.
Start-up subsidies should be considered to foster entrepreneurial activities. These can reduce the risk of early business failure.
If regulatory burdens are reduced and corruption is eliminated, countries will encourage and retain their own entrepreneurs and even attract innovators from other countries.
Thus, policy can influence the volume of entrepreneurial activity most effectively by adjusting the regulatory environment in favor of entrepreneurship.
The author thanks an anonymous referee and the IZA World of Labor editors for many helpful suggestions on earlier drafts.
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