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Presents guidelines to help companies develop products and services customers will buy for premium prices, outlining a revolutionary approach based on a theory that companies are actually \"hired\" by their customers to perform specific jobs.

Value chain–based approaches offer tremendous scope for market-based improvements in production, productivity, rural economy diversification, and household incomes, but are often covered by literature that is too conceptual or heavily focused on analysis. This has created a gap in the information available to planners, practitioners, and value chain participants. Furthermore, few references are available on how these approaches can be applied specifically to developing agriculture in Africa. 'Building Competitiveness in Africa's Agriculture: A Guide to Value Chain Concepts and Applications' describes practical implementation approaches and illustrates them with scores of real African agribusiness case studies. Using these examples, the 'Guide' presents a range of concepts, analytical tools, and methodologies centered on the value chain that can be used to design, implement, and evaluate agricultural and agribusiness development initiatives. It stresses principles of market focus, collaboration, information sharing, and innovation. The 'Guide' begins by examining core concepts and issues related to value chains. A brief literature review then focuses on five topics of particular relevance to African agricultural value chains. These topics address challenges faced by value chain participants and practitioners that resonate through the many cases described in the book. The core of the book presents methodological tools and approaches that blend important value chain concepts with the topics and with sound business principles. The tools and case studies have been selected for their usefulness in supporting market-driven, private-sector initiatives to improve value chains. The 'Guide' offers 13 implementation approaches, presented within the implementation cycle of a value chain program, followed by descriptions of actual cases. Roughly 60 percent of the examples are from Africa, while the rest come from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The 'Guide' offers useful guidance to businesspeople, policy makers, representatives of farmer or trade organizations, and others who are engaged in agro-enterprise and agribusiness development. These readers will learn how to use value chain approaches in ways that can contribute to sound operational decisions, improved market linkage, and better results for enterprise and industry development.

\"Startupland is the story of Zendesk, founded in the kitchen of a Copenhagen loft, and now a 500-person company with customers in 140 countries and one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley. Zendesk provides customer service software to major clients. Much like Zendesk's mission itself--to remove the friction, the barriers and the mystery in order to make software easier and more approachable--this book removes some of the myths about startups and startup founders. Instead of making things murky and complicated, this book inspires and empowers you to follow your own dream and create your own story. This book makes you want to go out and do something--not just because there's an opportunity in the market, or a path to make money, but because you want to build something that you believe in, are determined to design your own destiny, and understand that what you do matters.While there are books by consultants who tell you how to build businesses, or entrepreneurs now running billion dollar businesses, there are few books from people still in the trenches who acutely remember what it was like. Startupland is indispensable reading for all entrepreneurs who want to make their ideas the next big thing\"-- Provided by publisher.

Fostering the entrepreneurship of women is important for Pakistan's economic growth and inclusion agenda, and access to financial services is an important component of starting and growing a business for women entrepreneurs. Most women?owned businesses are small, household?based cottage industries; microfinance products should be a natural source of start?up and working capital finance for this clientele. Microfinance portfolio data suggest that although Pakistan's sector has shown improvement in reaching women, it still lags its regional peers, only 59 percent of microfinance clients are women. The original purpose of this work was to determine whether women entrepreneurs have access to, and are using, microfinance loans as a source of finance for their businesses. However, the findings of the report go beyond the narrow objective of understanding whether microfinance institutions (MFIs) are reaching Pakistan's businesswomen. As the research unfolded, the evidence suggested that not only are women entrepreneurs not being served, but also that the outreach to women in general is potentially more limited than previously assumed and that the issues of consumer protection and responsible lending practices in Pakistan might merit further exploration. The report raises and addresses two distinct issues. First, some evidence suggests that women are often not the final users of loans, but rather are conduits to male household members. The report documents findings that suggest that the practice of passing on loans to male household members is potentially quite widespread; women may be bearing all the transaction costs and risks of accessing loans, but are not the final beneficiaries. Second, a very low proportion of female microfinance clients are entrepreneurs. The report explores why businesswomen in Pakistan may not be using microfinance products to meet their startup and working capital requirements, in spite of identifying access to finance as a key constraint to their business operations. The report focuses on products, services, policies, and other elements of the business model of microfinance in Pakistan that affect both demand for and access to microfinance by women borrowers, some of whom fall into the narrower category of entrepreneurs.

Fostering entrepreneurial creation, supporting enterprise growth, ensuring sustainability, activating a private sector-led economy, generating employment, and addressing rural–urban migration are critical steps for tackling diverse socio-economic challenges—from shifting mindsets to addressing major societal issues. To understand the relationship between the program interventions of the Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI) and to investigate their impact on actual business performance and growth, this research employed a quantitative methodology with a focus on descriptive statistics. It examined key behavioural and business performance parameters through regression analysis. The findings demonstrate a significant positive effect of EDI Ethiopia’s program interventions on the growth and performance of MSMEs. This was empirically assessed from various perspectives, including behavioural changes, entrepreneurial competencies, practices, and business performance indicators, supported by direct client feedback. The results also indicate that the mixed-mode delivery of program intervention is a critical success factor for MSME performance and growth, evidenced by tangible improvements in business operations, including but not limited to revenue, sales, customer reach, job creation, diversification, formalization, and business management skills. Based on these findings, the research recommends strengthening program implementation at the national level through efficient resource mobilization to achieve key outcomes. It also emphasizes enhancing data management by focusing on key aspects influencing MSME performance and growth, as well as addressing critical challenges faced by MSMEs in collaboration with sectoral ecosystem players.

PurposeThis paper presents a university service-learning program as an innovative model of assistance to deliver business development services to Mexican microenterprises.Design/methodology/approachThe main objectives were to deliver business development services in situ at no cost to unprivileged enterprises, conduct research on microenterprises development and build up a service-learning model of teaching and learning for students in the field of economics and surrounding disciplines. It was implemented by the Autonomous University of Baja California. It plays an important role in providing real cases and concepts on business, economics, markets and fiscal regulations. The service-learning approach prepare to students to be generous, selfless, problem solvers and job creators.FindingsThe experience demonstrates that program can play a key role, both in supporting disadvantaged microenterprises and in providing meaningful learning experiences to students. The program has shown its ability to take advantage of institutional, human and financial resources already released to higher educations institutions (HEI) and government, to support social business extensively, as to make less critical the use of resources in the form of subsidies.Originality/valueThis program was employed by the Mexican State Government of Baja California as a compensatory public policy against the unemployment burden created by the global crisis between 2009 and 2013. About ten thousand individuals pushed to necessity-driven entrepreneurship or informal social enterprises were assisted, trained and formalized in the tax authority by 700 university senior students.

Background:Entrepreneurs have been galvanised by the worsened economic circumstances in South Africa, and small businesses struggle to become established. By providing skills training, business development services (BDS) improve the performance of firms, through the development of entrepreneurial self-efficacy.Aim:The objective of this study was to determine the impact of BDS training on the entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) of necessity- and opportunity-driven entrepreneurs and whether that impact would be more positive in opportunity-driven rather than necessity-driven entrepreneurs.Setting:The study focused on 519 entrepreneurs in South Africa, of which 97 were necessity-driven and 422 were opportunity-driven.Methods:Statistical analyses were conducted using correlation analysis and multiple linear regression to test the impact of training on the ESE of necessity- and opportunity-driven entrepreneurs while controlling for the impact of confounding variables: gender, education, management experience, industry experience and partnerships.Results:The empirical evidence from this study showed that general entrepreneurial training is more effective in increasing the entrepreneurial self-efficacy of opportunity-driven entrepreneurs, whereas task-specific training was better suited for increasing the entrepreneurial self-efficacy of necessity-driven entrepreneurs.Conclusion:The implications and recommendations of this study are that policymakers should design general entrepreneurial training programmes targeted at opportunity-driven entrepreneurs and task-specific training programmes targeted at necessity-driven entrepreneurs.Contribution:This study enhances the understanding of the training needs of necessity-driven entrepreneurs and how they differ from opportunity-driven entrepreneurs concerning ESE and the growth of their businesses.

We analyze in this paper how various forms of state intervention can impact microfinance institutions' lending behavior. Using a simple model where entrepreneurs receive individual uncollateralized loans, we show that, not surprisingly, state intervention through the loan guarantee increases the number of entrepreneurs receiving a loan. However, after modeling business development services (BDS) provided by the microfinance institution, we show that the loan guarantee can have a counterproductive effect by reducing the number of entrepreneurs benefiting from such services. We therefore analyze an alternative policy: BDS subsidization. We show that if BDS are efficient enough and are targeted toward less performing borrowers, then—for fixed government expenditures—such subsidies do better in terms of financial inclusion than the loan guarantee. Moreover, we argue that—under similar conditions—BDS subsidization alone does better in terms of financial inclusion than a mix of policies.

This article studies the role of private business development service (BDS) providers in targeting the business needs of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) using a self-sustainable business model. The availability and access to private BDS providers is essential for MSMEs to learn and acquire new operations, marketing, management, resourcing, technology, and innovation skills. The research objective involves understanding BDS challenges and corresponding strategic actions adopted by BDS providers while serving the MSMEs. A qualitative multicase-based research methodology is applied to data collection and analysis. The experience of BDS providers studied here helps gauge provisioning across all countries. BDS challenges involve environmental complexity, lack of awareness and identity, decisions on the types of service offerings, scarcity of resources, and ethical dilemmas. The corresponding strategic actions are identified and mapped to the challenges faced by BDS providers.

This report is part of a broader effort by the World Bank Group to understand the motives and challenges of small entrepreneurs in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS). The report's key finding is that, compared to entrepreneurs elsewhere, entrepreneurs in FCS have different characteristics, face significantly different challenges, and thus may be subject to different incentives and have different motives. Therefore, it is recommended that both the current analytical approach and the operational strategy of the World Bank be informed by the findings that follow. The report summarizes findings of recent World Bank Enterprise Surveys (ES) conducted across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Asia, and the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) Region as well as Doing Business indicators and additional World Bank Group studies and field observations. The report finds that the majority of entrepreneurs in FCS countries are small, informal, and concentrated in the trade/services sectors. According to the ES, and after controlling for the level of development (that is, GDP per capita): 1) the average FCS firm in SSA and the ECA Region produces less output than non-FCS firms; 2) the average FCS firm in ECA is by 20 percent less likely to innovate (that is, to introduce/upgrade new products and services) than its non-FCS counterpart; and 3) FCS firms start smaller and grow significantly more slowly, or even shrink (in the number of employees) over time, compared to non-FCS firms in the Regions analyzed. The report also highlights the differences in sector and business environment characteristics between FCS and non-FCS business environments.