This VoxDevLit reviews research on entrepreneurship training. Aid agencies and governments spend more than a billion US$ on entrepreneurship training annually. But what have we learned about its effectiveness? Classroom-based training remains the most popular method of training owners and managers of small firms. A meta-analysis shows that the standard training model has modestly positive effects, on average, though the effects imply reasonably high returns on investments in training, given low costs per participant. Innovation on this basic training model has increased in recent years, particularly with regard to content. Both personal initiative and rule-of-thumb training show promise for subsistencelevel enterprises. Individual consulting has shown significant positive effects for larger enterprises, but the model is expensive and markets for consulting do not appear to work well.
Furthermore, selection is important, particularly in matching the type of entrepreneurship development training with the type of enterprise. There are several seemingly promising approaches to training entrepreneurship skills where definitive evidence is lacking. For example, Kaizen approaches and incubators and accelerators both appear to have positive effects, though the evidence is limited and, in the case of accelerators, it is unclear as yet whether the effects come primarily from selection or from the content of the programmes themselves. A full summary of the evidence on education and training for entrepreneurship can be found in the full VoxDevLit.
Training Entrepreneurs (Issue 3): Presentation of key takeaways
For our launch event, David McKenzie and Chris Woodruff joined us to present the key takeaways from this VoxDevLit, highlighting policy relevant results from recent economic research on training and developing entrepreneurs.