Overview

Overview:

A collaboration between the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and Emory University, the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative has been made possible by its co-creators and founding sponsors, including the U.S. Global Development Lab at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Omidyar Network, The Lemelson Foundation and the Argidius Foundation.

Since 2011, hundreds of accelerators have launched around the world far beyond Silicon Valley in places like Nairobi, Mexico City, and Mumbai. Investors, development agencies, and governments are excited by their potential to drive growth, spur innovation, solve social problems, and increase employment opportunities in emerging markets.

Despite this interest, rigorous research on the effectiveness of acceleration methods has not kept pace. We currently know little about their effectiveness or how differences across programs and models influence entrepreneur performance.

To address this gap, Social Enterprise @ Goizueta at Emory University (SE@G) and ANDE launched the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative (GALI) in collaboration with a consortium of public and private funders. GALI builds on the work of the Entrepreneurship Database Program at Emory, which has been working with accelerator programs around the world to collect and analyze data describing the many entrepreneurs that they attract and support.

Spud’s Thoughts:

If you are interested in building out social change programs, there’s some good insight and research from this group that you can build on.