Promoting High Impact Entrepreneurship in Mexico: an Impact Evaluation

The High Impact Entrepreneurship Programme 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 randomised controlled trial, this project will investigate the overall impact of the programme on firms’ performance measured by outcomes such as productivity, sales, job creation and innovation. This trial will also randomise 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 programmes by improving selection criteria, procedures and targeting strategy.