This framework is intended to assist key stakeholders of BtB, senior leadership, programme teams and delivery bodies to understand the approach BtB takes towards evaluation and what standards are expected in the form of robust evaluations to inform future decision making. Robust evaluation helps key stakeholders understand impact, informs spending reviews and fiscal events. Programmes vary in nature and as a result this framework does not set out one particular way of conducting evaluation.

Practitioners and academic researchers studying business accelerators have produced a substantial number of studies on accelerators. The online scholastic archive Social Science Research Network (SSRN), for instance, lists almost 800 entries on the topic since 2005, with over two-thirds of the posts dated 2018 or later.

Despite the importance of innovation and high-growth entrepreneurship for economic growth, there are still many open questions on the best approaches to support them. This policy brief looks at the need to experiment with new approaches to innovation policy and, crucially, learn what works.

This guide is designed for policymakers, researchers and practitioners who:

Innovation policymakers face a complex and continuously evolving system and have limited evidence on how to most effectively influence it. This can be addressed by turning the current model of policymaking upside down through experimentation. The authors of this report spoke to the agencies to understand the enabling conditions for experimentation, collating these under two factors: openness and capabilities to experiment.
This resource gives an overview and non-technical introduction to randomized evaluations. Randomized evaluations can be used to measure impact in policy research: to date, J-PAL affiliated researchers have conducted more than 1,100 randomized evaluations studying policies in ten thematic sectors in more than 90 countries.

This publication issues OECD guidance on how governments can promote reliable SME and entrepreneurship policy evaluation. It emphasises practices including using control groups, setting clear policy objectives and targets and accounting for business survival and non-survival. It shows that reliable evaluation of SME and entrepreneurship policy is increasingly accessible given improvements in data and techniques in recent years and illustrates this with examples of 50 reliable evaluations across many SME and entrepreneurship policy areas and 28 OECD countries.

This toolkit provides methodological guidance on assessing the current state of entrepreneurial ecosystems and offers a set of resources and tools that can be used by development practitioners. This toolkit does not aim to be exhaustive, but is intended to serve as a basis for other organizations to build upon. To develop this toolkit, ANDE conducted a comprehensive review of publicly available literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems and identified nine evaluative frameworks. We assessed these frameworks and synthesized key elements and indicators.
This interactive Guide gives development professionals the necessary theoretical background, concepts, approaches and practical tools to strengthen entrepreneurial ecosystems in developing countries. It is intended to be used as a reference after the professionals have completed their analytical ‘mapping’ of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The Ecosystem Health Toolkit is a self-serving tool that includes a self-serving online KPI dashboard to be filled by local ecosystem professionals as well as an extensive user guide including two cases where the tool has been put into action (Cologne Germany and Guatemala City). It also includes a theoretical framework, that provides the reasoning and logic that underpin the tool. The toolkit supports managers of startup programs, university incubators, research transfer organizations, ecosystem builders and policy makers to track the progress of their ecosystem build-up.

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