Promoting High Impact Entrepreneurship in Mexico: An Impact Evaluation

The High Impact Entrepreneurship Program aims to provide support to Mexican SMEs through a matching grant scheme to support their development and increase their capabilities to succeed. The targeted firms are start]ups and scale]up firms that offer an innovative product, service or business model with high potential to compete globally and generate high impact in economic, social and environmental outcomes. Through a randomized control trial, we will investigate the overall impact of the program on firms’ performance measured by outcomes such as productivity, sales, job creation and innovation. We will also randomize across two different sets of selection panels to select beneficiaries, one panel that has no reason to be biased but does not have industry experience, and one panel that is potentially
biased but has industry experience. This will contribute to a better understanding of
how to implement matching grants programs by improving selection criteria,
procedures and targeting strategy.