Call the midwife! Business incubation, enterprise development and entrepreneurship enablement in developing economies

Enabling domestic entrepreneurship is one pathway for alleviating poverty. In developing economies however, public policies prioritize health and education above entrepreneurship promotion. While international development funding has traditionally supported social and environmental interventions, more recent corporate philanthropic funding has been invested in business incubators to support domestic entrepreneurship. This article examines how business incubation and enterprise development impact on poverty alleviation in developing economies. From the analysis of empirical data gathered from four philanthropy-funded business incubators, their role in how sustainable new venture creation and multiple capital formation contributes to poverty alleviation is explained. The findings contribute to entrepreneurship enablement theory

Social economy advancement: from voluntary to secure organizational commitments to public benefit

The aim of this paper is to explain the development of the social economy in the United Kingdom (UK) by analyzing the establishment in 2005 of a new organizational form for social enterprise - the Community Interest Company (CIC). The CIC is a legal structure designed to permit trading for social purpose and ensure that company assets are committed to community benefit in perpetuity. The establishment of the CIC legal structure was an important historical event, especially in the UK where the previous new organization legal structure was introduced more than 100 years ago (Nicholls, 2010). How new institutions are instantiated is an important aspect of economy and society (Smith and Teasdale, 2012) and an historical lens enriches our understanding of social economy development in the UK. Moreover, we are only just beginning to understand the impacts of new legal structures for social enterprise on social economies in different countries (Gottesman, 2007; Gupta, 2011; Lasprogata and Cotten, 2003; Rawhauser et al., 2015; Reiser, 2011, 2013; Smiddy, 2010). The research is guided by the question when, why and how was a new legal structure for social enterprise established in the UK?The research was funded by grants from the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations

Social enterprises as hybrid organizations: a review and research agenda

The impacts of the global economic crisis of 2008, the intractable problems of persistent poverty and environmental change have focused attention on organizations that combine enterprise with an embedded social purpose. Scholarly interest in social enterprise (SE) has progressed beyond the early focus on definitions and context to investigate their management and performance. From a review of the SE literature, the authors identify hybridity, the pursuit of the dual mission of financial sustainability and social purpose, as the defining characteristic of SEs.They assess the impact of hybridity on the management of the SE mission, financial resource acquisition and human resource mobilization, and present a framework for understanding the tensions and trade-offs resulting from hybridity. By examining the influence of dual mission and conflicting institutional logics on SE management the authors suggest future research directions for theory development for SE and hybrid organizations more generally

Social entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship and social value creation

Social entrepreneurship has attracted attention from scholars, policy makers and practitioners in developed and developing countries around the world. Much of the early research was devoted to addressing definitional debates and contextual differences and only recently have scholars turned their attention to investigating the relationship between social value creation and opportunity identification and exploitation. The aim of the chapter is three fold. First, we review the rise to prominence of social entrepreneurship and the principal definitional and contextual debates. Second, we summarize the main research findings concerning social value creation and opportunity identification and exploitation. Finally, we identify ten critical topics for advancing social entrepreneurship knowledge and theory development

When formal institutions impede entrepreneurship: how and why refugees establish new ventures in the Dadaab refugee camps

For this paper we investigated refugee entrepreneurship in the Dadaab refugee camps, Kenya, a place where humanitarian aid practices and domestic legislation impede entrepreneurship, yet hundreds of new ventures have been established by refugees. The analysis finds that refugee camp entrepreneurs erode formal institutions, recombine conducive aspects of both formal and informal institutions, and exploit the advantages of institutional misalignment. We explain how entrepreneurs strategically maintain rather than overcome institutional misalignment for venture creation. Second, we show how self-determination, rather than mere subsistence or necessity, is an important yet often overlooked motivator for entrepreneurship in low and lower middle-income contexts

The advantage of lefties in one-on-one sports

Left-handers comprise approximately 15% of professional tennis players, but only 11% of the general population. In boxing, baseball, fencing, table-tennis and specialist batting positions in cricket the contrast is even starker, with 30% or more of top players often being left-handed. In this paper we propose a model for identifying the advantage of being left-handed in one-on-one interactive sports (as well as the inherent skill of each player). We construct a Bayesian latent ability model in the spirit of the classic Glicko model but with the additional complication of having a latent factor, i.e. the advantage of left-handedness, that we need to estimate. Inference is further complicated by the truncated nature of data-sets that arise from only having data of the top players. We show how to infer the advantage of left-handedness when only the proportion of top left-handed players is available. We use this result to develop a simple dynamic model for inferring how the advantage of left-handedness varies through time. We also extend the model to cases where we have ranking or match-play data. We test these models on 2014 match-play data from top male professional tennis players, and the dynamic model on data from 1985 to 2016

Multi-scale mechanical characterization of highly swollen photo-activated collagen hydrogels

Biological hydrogels have been increasingly sought after as wound dressings or scaffolds for regenerative medicine, owing to their inherent biofunctionality in biological environments. Especially in moist wound healing, the ideal material should absorb large amounts of wound exudate while remaining mechanically competent in situ. Despite their large hydration, however, current biological hydrogels still leave much to be desired in terms of mechanical properties in physiological conditions. To address this challenge, a multi-scale approach is presented for the synthetic design of cyto-compatible collagen hydrogels with tunable mechanical properties (from the nano- up to the macro-scale), uniquely high swelling ratios and retained (more than 70%) triple helical features. Type I collagen was covalently functionalized with three different monomers, i.e. 4-vinylbenzyl chloride, glycidyl methacrylate and methacrylic anhydride, respectively. Backbone rigidity, hydrogen-bonding capability and degree of functionalization (F: 16 ± 12–91 ± 7 mol%) of introduced moieties governed the structure–property relationships in resulting collagen networks, so that the swelling ratio (SR: 707 ± 51–1996 ± 182 wt%), bulk compressive modulus (Ec: 30 ± 7–168 ± 40 kPa) and atomic force microscopy elastic modulus (EAFM: 16 ± 2–387 ± 66 kPa) were readily adjusted. Because of their remarkably high swelling and mechanical properties, these tunable collagen hydrogels may be further exploited for the design of advanced dressings for chronic wound care

The nascent ecology of social enterprise

Funder: Edmond de Rothschild FoundationsFunder: Isaac Newton Trust; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004815Employing population ecology theory, we examine social enterprise population emergence in the United Kingdom after 2005 when a new organizational form for social enterprise was established. Our density dependence analysis of nearly seven thousand Community Interest Companies finds that survival is positively influenced by age and population densities of both other social enterprises and commercial organizations. Two specific patterns in population emergence are identified: social enterprise survival is more likely influenced by industry than age, a finding that we label the liability of specificity, and their survival benefits from the population density of commercial organizations but not nonprofit organizations, a finding that we label the hybrid-commercial benefit. Our research identifies the liability of specificity as a new concept in population ecology theory and the hybrid-commercial benefit as a contextual influence on social enterprise survival

Second Order Perturbations in the Randall-Sundrum Infinite Brane-World Model

We discuss the non-linear gravitational interactions in the Randall-Sundrum single brane model. If we naively write down the 4-dimensional effective action integrating over the fifth dimension with the aid of the decomposition with respect to eigen modes of 4-dimensional d'Alembertian, the Kaluza-Klein mode coupling seems to be ill-defined. We carefully analyze second order perturbations of the gravitational field induced on the 3-brane under the assumption of the static and axial-symmetric 5-dimensional metric. It is shown that there remains no pathological feature in the Kaluza-Klein mode coupling after the summation over all different mass modes. Furthermore, the leading Kaluza-Klein corrections are shown to be sufficiently suppressed in comparison with the leading order term which is obtained by the zero mode truncation. We confirm that the 4-dimensional Einstein gravity is approximately recovered on the 3-brane up to second order perturbations.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, comment and reference added, typos correcte