Dafna Schwartz (p), Raphael Bar-El, David Bentolila

Marianna Marino

Nowadays innovation is the key driver for economic growth, companies are trying to tune their antennae to new technologies and trends and respond quickly by adapting their business strategy and work plan in the face of rapid changes in the business and technology environment. One of the tools to achieve this that has gained popularity in large companies is the Reverse Mentoring (RM) model.
Although the prevailing RM model- junior mentoring senior employees- benefits both and promotes innovation, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do not implement it due to the lack of economies of scale, lower organizational capacities, and scarcity of skilled junior employees. This is even more problematic for SMEs in peripherial areas that encounter difficulties in promoting innovation.
This study proposes and examines the feasibility of a new RM Model in promoting innovation in SMEs. Empirical testing was implemented in the state of Ceara, Brazil.
The new RM Model overcomes the above disadvantages through two major alterations: first, intervention of an intermediate trusted professional entity that initiates and supports the program for several companies; second, the mentors are not junior employees, but external graduate students.
The findings support the new model’s feasibility and efficacy for SMEs. It enabled significant innovative ideas and resulted in out-of-the-box thinking, better evaluation of constraints, identification of potentials for innovation opportunities by the company’s leaders and adaptation of an open innovation approach, which is important for SMEs with relatively limited financial and non-financial resources.
This study contributes to the literature on SMEs and RM by providing valuable information on the prevailing RM model and offering a new model that can overcome existing market failures experienced by SMEs.

Juliane Schwarz (p), Max Nathan, Golzalo Nunez-Chaim, Capucine Riom, Henry Overman, Olmo Silva

Dafna Schwartz

Recent years have seen rapid and extensive growth of business accelerator programmes, both in the UK and in other OECD countries. Such programmes are claimed to have large positive effects on entrepreneurship, innovation and business growth for participating companies. However, there is a lack of robust evidence on actual programme effects and how these are achieved. For example, highly selective programmes may choose firms who would have succeeded without business support. Given that many programmes now benefit from public support, understanding impact is important.

In this paper we report on an ongoing multi-year, mixed methods evaluation of an accelerator programme in London, run by one of the UK’s leading providers. The programme aims to support 150 competitively selected start-ups and early stage companies in the creative and tech industries over 3 years. It takes a ‘person-centred’ approach, supporting new entrepreneurs in their initial journey towards business success through an intensive 3-month programme of mentoring, technical advice, networking and peer feedback tools. It aims to raise participant firms’ survival, employment and innovation, as well as raising founders leadership skills and confidence.

We report emerging findings from the evaluation, drawing on rich programme management data, participant surveys, interviews with participants and programme managers as well as secondary data on post-programme outcomes. We focus on 1) participants’ experience of the programme 2) changes in their behaviour during and after the programme and 3) changes in business outcomes.

Hiba Bouazza (p), Imane Elqayaoui, Eduardo Haddad

Juliane Schwarz

Is there a relationship between labor market characteristics and entrepreneurship in the Moroccan ecosystem? To address this question, we explore two data sets that provide regional-level information for the country. First, we use census microdata to develop a people-based indicator of potential for innovation for Moroccan provinces and regions. We then collect regional data about enterprises creation and survival from the “Ministère de l’Inclusion Économique, de la Petite Entreprise, de l’Emploi et des Compétences”. We test the hypothesis whether the creation of new enterprises in large urban areas is more challenging than in other regions due to labor market rigidity. We discuss some policies that may enhance entrepreneurship behavior in Morocco, such as the reduction in the number and time of the officially required procedures for enterprises creation, the reform in the tax system for newly created enterprises, the promotion of R&D, and the simplification of the access to loans and financial services for new entrepreneurs.

Alessandra Faggian, Marianna Marino (p), Sandro Montresor

Hiba Bouazza

Social capital has been proved to be an important factor that stimulates regional innovation in different contexts. However, there is scant systematic evidence on the specific role social capital can play in restoring regional innovation outcomes in the aftermath of economic crises. This paper aims to fill this gap.
From a theoretical point of view, we draw on previous studies in maintaining that: (i) social capital can contribute to restore the climate of trust and confidence, which is necessary for knowledge exchanges, collaboration contracts and risk-taking behavior; (ii) through local social capital, agents can return to get access to valuable information and external resources, which help them facing the uncertainty inherent to innovative activities. We expect that such an innovative restoring effect should be higher for bridging than for bonding social capital, given the importance of the local inclusiveness with respect to incoming diverse ideas (bridging) and the risk of lockinness entailed by an excessive social cohesiveness (bonding).
We test for these predictions with respect to the Italian provinces (NUTS3 regions) in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. We combine data retrieved by the Italian Statistical Institute (ISTAT), Eurostat and European Value Survey (EVS) to build up a proxy of bridging social capital following Guiso et al. (2004), and of bonding social capital as in Antonietti and Boshma (2021). We define provinces with high bridging and high bonding social capital as those with related pre-sample value falling in the upper tercile of the respective distribution.
Considering the year of the burst of the crisis, we run a diff-in-diff estimation controlling for unemployment rate, population density, the number of big banks, newspaper circulation, and the degree of trade openness to the global markets. We use both linear fixed effect regression model and the Conley spatial HAC standard errors (Conley, 1999; 2008) approach to consider both spatial and serial correlations of errors.
In line with theoretical predictions, we find evidence that provinces with higher pre-sample levels of bridging social capital perform better in terms of innovation outcomes after-crisis compared to their sample counterparts. This result is significant, sizeable and stable across specifications and estimation methods. Interestingly, also higher pre-sample levels of bonding social capital appear to foster innovation activities. This result is however weaker and less stable than the one found for the complementary dimension of social capital. A number of robustness checks confirm and corroborate our main findings.