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This paper argues that policymakers and academics should place more emphasis on maximising the additional benefit created by entrepreneurial support programs and impact investments. It demonstrates a robust approach to advancing this field of research by using qualitative methods to determine the variables that may predict the additional benefit a firm will gain from funding.

The research is based on 60 semi-structured interviews averaging 1.5 h each; 45 with entrepreneurs that did or did not receive funding from a business plan competition in Nigeria, 15 with relevant elites. Detailed World Bank panel data on program participants further validated responses and supported conclusions.

Numerous factors that may explain additional benefit were uncovered, including those that vary the need for external funding and those that vary access to it.

Qualitative methods explored variables previously assumed to be unobservable. Future studies are necessary to test the results quantitatively.

Understanding the characteristics that indicate ex ante which firms would most benefit from support will help policymakers, impact investors and development institutions to more effectively allocate capital.

This paper addresses the paucity of research into increasing additional impact and demonstrates the value of pursuing it. Methods used to suggest additionality variables for such programs and many of the factors highlighted are unique to this study. The research is also based on unique access to the participants and un-anonymised data from a significant World Bank study, and on substantially more interviews than previous papers.

The purpose is to assess the usefulness of creative vouchers, a specific kind of technology and innovation vouchers (small grants usually given to SMEs to acquire external knowledge) where the knowledge suppliers are creative firms such as design agencies.

A multiple case analysis of four EU-funded pilot voucher schemes was carried out through project reports and semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders.

The authors show that creative vouchers are effective policy instruments despite the limited amount of money involved because they trigger new innovation trajectories often in a serendipitous way. The authors also show that the quality of projects and satisfaction of the beneficiaries increase when both proposals and suppliers are screened.

The authors’ conclusions are based on four pilot projects in a specific region of the world (Western Europe). Though two of them were extended to a much bigger scale, their generalizability may be limited. Moreover, the limited number of cases does not permit an analytical evaluation of all the voucher schemes mechanisms.

The findings of this paper can be very useful to policymakers designing voucher schemes and to the companies involved, whether they are providers or beneficiaries. In particular, the voucher allocation mechanisms may have a strong impact on the success of the program.

The innovation spurred by the collaboration with creative firms is generally neither energy-intensive nor capital intensive, but brain intensive, and this is the best way to leverage on the talent of local creative and make companies create value based on immaterial resources.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of creative vouchers after Bakhsi et al., 2015, and the only one involving several schemes in different countries. It shows the innovation potential of such a little known policy instrument for SMEs. Moreover, it provides insight on how to design a voucher scheme in order to improve its effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of government intervention on a firm's innovation activities.

On the basis of previous literature, this paper proposes a framework to explain behavioral changes in the firm resulting from government interventions. Using propensity score matching technique, this research tries to estimate the effect of R&D subsidies on Iranian firms (small and medium-sized enterprises and large-sized firms).

This paper identified that R&D subsidies have a significant effect on the innovation process. Furthermore, investigations indicate that behavioral variables (innovation capabilities, collaboration agreements and risk-taking) have been partly changed in both SMEs and large firms after subsidizing. The analysis of innovation outputs showed that although R&D subsidies significantly increase the number of new products/services or patents (especially for SMEs), it could not increase the total sale of the firms. These results show that the effect of R&D subsidies has not interestingly covered all variables influencing innovation activities.

The work used dynamic capability theory, transaction cost theory and behavioral theory of the firm to explain behavioral changes in the firm resulting from government interventions.

This paper proposes several policy concerns which can help the policymakers to stimulate the innovation support procedures in Iran.

This paper provides insights for improved policymaking which in turn can aid boosting social welfare.

This paper re-conceptualized behavioral additionality based on firms’ behavioral theories and evaluated the effects of Iranian R&D subsidies on their measures.

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of national and international R&D support programmes on firms’ technology scouting, defined as firms’ use of external knowledge sources.

Drawing on a unique data set on R&D support programmes for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in both manufacturing and service sectors across 28 European countries, this study reports treatment effects estimated by the copula-based endogenous switching model, which takes into account unobserved firm heterogeneity.

Empirical results indicate that R&D support programmes have heterogeneous effects on technology scouting. In particular, a crowding-out effect arises in the case of informal sources of external knowledge, whereas additional effects are reported for formal, strategic sources.

For informal sources of external knowledge, a random distribution of R&D measures would have a substantially larger effect rather than using current selection criteria.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the policy effects on technology scouting applying a copula-based endogenous switching model. Most cross-sectional empirical studies use matching estimators, although their main disadvantage is the selection on observables.

This paper evaluates the effects of tax incentives on business innovation in Brazil that were established by Law 11,196/05 (the “Fiscal Incentives Law”) to test whether they have had a positive impact on beneficiary firms' innovation input and output and on their performance.

The policy impacts are estimated using microdata on 13,706 firms available in the 2008 and 2011 editions of the Brazilian Innovation Survey (PINTEC) and by applying propensity score matching with difference-in-differences.

The results suggest a positive and statistically significant impact of the policy on research and development (R&D) expenditures (average of approximately US$ 264,000 in 2011), the number of research staff (average of five researchers) and total employment (approximately 5% of the beneficiary firms' mean size). However, no impact was found on the overall spending on innovative activities, the percentage of sales and exports from new products, net revenue or net revenue per employee.

The findings provide empirical support in favor of tax incentives as a policy tool to boost business innovation in the country. However, the absence of significant effects on innovative activities expenditures and on most indicators of innovation output and firms' performance reveals shortcomings of the policy that need to be addressed.

The study complements and advances the findings of previous studies by assessing policy impact on total innovative activities expenditures and on innovation output and firm performance.

The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which R&D subsidy can affect the innovation process of manufacturing venture firms by examining the output additionality measured as both proximal indicators of innovation and distal indicators of growth. Further, the differences in output additionality between the clusters in the subcontracting regime were examined to investigate whether the effect of R&D subsidy can vary depending on subcontracting practices and structure among large enterprises and venture firms.

This study uses survey data of the Korea Venture Business Association conducted in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 respectively, which selects a random sample from venture firms by stratified random sampling method based on the industry sector, size and location for each survey year. This study analyzed the data using an endogenous treatment effects model to estimate the average treatment effect of R&D subsidy, yielding more accurate estimates than a traditional treatment effects model by controlling the unobserved endogenous components.

This research found that R&D subsidy may not facilitate the process of transformation of innovation into financial growth even though R&D subsidy can facilitate the innovation process and contribute to producing new and improved products. This research also reveals that the relationship between R&D subsidy and innovation performance for firms heavily dependent on subcontracting is generally much weaker than those for independent subcontractors. Further, the present study exhibits that public R&D subsidy for independently subcontracting venture firms is more effective for the growth in both employment and sales than those for subcontracting with large enterprises or other subcontractors.

R&D subsidy for venture firms does not relieve the burden of liability of newness and smallness of venture firms, especially the disadvantage in market penetration and competition. In addition, venture firms subcontracting with large enterprises or other prime subcontractors tend to achieve incremental innovation with the help of the technology and competence of large companies and run stable businesses through a predetermined market.

R&D subsidy for venture firms does not relieve the burden of liability of newness and smallness of venture firms, especially the disadvantage in market penetration and competition. Further policy measures should be implemented so as to identify and eliminate barriers to market acceptance for new products of venture firms.

This research verifies that the effect of R&D subsidy may harmful to the sales growth of venture firms and the output additionality differs with the degree of dependency on subcontracting practices and structure.

Entrepreneurial learning through formal growth-oriented training programs for SME managers promises to enhance the growth competences and growth intentions of the enrolled managers. The impact of such programs, however, depends on who enrolls since initial competence and growth-intention levels vary significantly. Potential participants may suffer from limited ability to transform new knowledge into practice, absence of growth intention and too high or too low a prior competence level to be able to benefit substantially. Selection and self-selection processes therefore have a bearing on the extent to which such programs result in additionality, i.e. improved growth performance compared to non-intervention. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Selection and self-selection processes are explored through a study of a large-scale training program for growth-oriented managers of small Danish firms. This program has, from 2012 to 2015, trained about 700 SME managers. Data are currently available for 366 of these participants. This evidence is compared with survey results from a randomly selected control group of 292 growth-oriented SME managers in the same firm-size group. The data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis.

A number of selection and self-selection biases were identified in the analysis. While some of the identified biases did not seem to conflict with the ambitions of this growth program, others potentially have consequences for the additionality of the program.

The paper is the first systematic study of the importance of who enrolls in training programs for SME managers.

The aim of this paper is to identify ways for improvement of the foresight evaluation framework on the basis of analysis and systematisation of accumulated experience in the field of project management.

The paper is based on a detailed literature review devoted to an evaluation of foresight and traditional projects. The approaches to project evaluation in the field of project management were investigated, and the main steps of traditional project evaluation process were determined. The most commonly applied steps of foresight evaluation were identified by the analysis of recent foresight evaluation projects. The comparison of evaluation frameworks for foresight projects and traditional projects allows to provide recommendations for foresight evaluation framework improvement.

The paper identifies several lessons for foresight evaluation from project management. The elements which can enrich foresight evaluation framework are the following: the development of an evaluation model; the extensive use of quantitative methods; the elaboration of evaluation scales; the inclusion of economic indicators into evaluation; and the provision of more openness and transparency for evaluation results.

Given the importance of foresight evaluation procedures and the lack of a commonly applied methodological approach, the value of this paper consists in identifying a foresight evaluation framework and enriching it with elements of project management.

Through its effect on the cost of capital, impact investing has the potential to improve the pricing of externalities, reducing the current overproduction and consumption of goods with negative social and environmental impacts and stimulating production and consumption of goods with positive social and environmental impacts. For this potential to be realised, the design of impact investing needs to be better aligned with portfolio management in two respects: (1) it needs to be possible to assess the impact of both asset classes and individual assets and (2) the analysis of the characteristics of assets needs to be separated from the use of mandate-related screens.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of public support through equity instruments on firm performance, as measured by growth in employment, turnover and innovative activities.

The paper draws on available academic literature and policy evaluation studies and using a mixed-method approach based on evaluation synthesis.

The key findings reflect positive, albeit quantifiably small, outcomes for this type of policy intervention for employment and turnover and no effect on innovation. There is some concentration of positive results, which is also dependent on the number and quality of the available target companies.

The evaluations used in this study vary considerably in their design, nature and the input and output variables used and, thus, limit a robust comparison of their outputs. Most of the evaluations examined in this paper did not control for multiple simultaneous treatment effects and/or subsequent funding rounds.

The evaluations are rarely designed to compare the treatment effects of alternative policy choices. Only seldom is an evaluation designed to assess the impact of the scheme in the context of the broader policy mix (with its framework conditions, etc.) which would provide more fine-grained policy implications.

The recent literature (Duruflé et al., 2017, Da Rin et al., 2011) highlights the dearth of studies exploring the role of government policies supporting venture and, more broadly, equity investments beyond comparisons of the efficiency of independent venture capital and government-backed venture capital. Most studies explore the impact in terms of exits, initial public offering and leverage effects whereas fewer studies look at output effects on companies such as turnover and employment growth. The paper aims to collect the existing evidence including less analysed policy evaluation studies and draw lessons for public policy.