From Programme Promise to Accountable Policy

An accountable entrepreneurship-support system begins before the first grant, workshop, or accelerator cohort. It begins when a broad promise is narrowed into an objective, a target population, a time horizon, and evidence that can distinguish additional impact from activity. This chapter turns the earlier diagnosis into a practical decision model: how to specify what support is for, measure it without losing important outcomes, and choose among financial, advisory, selective, inclusive, macro, and intermediary interventions under real constraints.

The goal is not a universal checklist. A programme for unemployed people leaving the labor market should not be judged by exactly the same outcome as a programme intended to increase high-growth firms. But different objectives do not justify vague objectives. Conditional judgment requires clarity about the condition.

Start with a promise that can be judged

“Make the country more entrepreneurial” is an attractive political phrase and a poor evaluation objective. It can mean more business creation, more high-growth firms, more innovators, more social enterprises, more international sales, or a stronger entrepreneurial culture. Those outcomes are related, but they are not identical. A programme that increases entry may have no effect on survival. A programme that helps existing firms export may reduce neither unemployment nor the number of new ventures. A programme that improves skills may not increase sales within the evaluation period.

A better objective identifies the change the intervention is expected to cause. The OECD gives examples such as raising new-business creation among unemployed or disadvantaged groups, increasing the proportion of high-growth SMEs, increasing the number of social enterprises, or promoting international sales through subsidized trade-fair participation. Each objective points toward a different population, mechanism, and outcome. It also creates a boundary: a programme cannot claim every favorable change in the economy as its impact.

Targets make objectives operational by adding magnitude and time. “Increase the proportion of high-growth SMEs” is an objective. “Raise the proportion from one level to another over five years” is a target that can be assessed. A target is not a guarantee that the programme will succeed; it is a pre-commitment that makes success and failure more visible. Without it, an evaluation can be forced to infer what policymakers intended after the results are known.

The distinction between objective and input is equally important. Increasing the number of firms attending training measures reach. Increasing participant satisfaction measures experience. Neither necessarily shows that the support changed firm performance. Input measures are useful for managing delivery and finding problems, but they are weak substitutes for outcomes. A programme can be full while the underlying business constraint remains untouched.

This first step also protects against a common distortion in the entrepreneurship industry: replacing a difficult material goal with an easier symbolic one. If a programme is meant to improve survival or employment, a polished pitch day or a large number of certificates cannot quietly become the definition of success. Visibility can be a useful intermediate result, but it should remain labeled as such.