Credit Suisse - Swisscontact Initiative to promote entrepreneurship and innovation

Objective

Credit Suisse has a long history of entrepreneurship going back to its founding. Swisscontact has decades of experience fostering, supporting, and accelerating entrepreneurs all over the world and research clearly recognizes the important role of entrepreneurs for economic growth and job creation in emerging markets.

Yet entrepreneurs do not exist in a vacuum. Just as it takes 'a whole village to raise a child', it takes a whole ecosystem to nurture, guide and raise successful entrepreneurs. It is widely acknowledged that a well-functioning ecosystem is therefore key to fostering systemic entrepreneurial success and for Swisscontact - with ‘Inclusive System Development’ as part of our DNA - it is only logical to take a systemic perspective on entrepreneurship.

Now, the challenge we observed was that while the concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems and ecosystem building had gained attention, it was not obvious how to transfer and operationalize these insights to the programs on the ground. Little was being said about key characteristics of successful ecosystems and even less about how to influence and measure them. The aim of this initiative was therefore to help identify and share best practice around the key characteristics of successful ecosystems.

Structure

The project was structured along the topics of ‘Testing’, ‘Harvesting’ and ‘Promotion’ with activities on a global level, but with focus on Guatemala, Cambodia, Rwanda and Uganda.

Led by local entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders we tested a range of approaches and tools in different contexts, we harvested existing best practices and worked on promoting them on different levels – working directly with entrepreneurs, with ecosystem building support organisations as well as exchanging and collaborating with funding institutions. 

Activities

Important Activities and Achievements of the initiative include:

• Conducting Social Network Analysis for Uganda (Kampala & Jinja), Rwanda (Kigali) and Cambodia (Phnom Penh) and promoting the tool within donor and ecosystem builder communities.
• Developing the Ecosystem Health Check with its framework and piloting in Germany, Guatemala, Cambodia, Albania, Lebanon and Nigeria in collaboration with DEEP Ecosystems.
• Co-creating the Trust Building Playbook with ecosystem builders from Uganda and the USA.
• Co-creating of the Beyond The Known Conference 2019 and 2021 with other donor organizations
• Piloting of an accelerator program for East Africa together with DEEP Ecosystem in 2021
• Piloting the Give A Day format in Cambodia after its development in Uganda
• Hosting a donor roundtable at Sankalp Summit East Africa 2020 on “how to move from donor-centric to entrepreneur-centric ecosystems”
• Co-founding of the OS4Grwoth initiative
• Speaking at a range of virtual and physical events to promote the Social Network Analysis, the Ecosystem Health Check, the Trust Building Playbook.

Key learnings

For the most important take away and recommendations after 4,5 years of the CSSC initiative please have a look at our “Key Learnings” here.

Financing partners

This project is financed by Credit Suisse. It is part of the Swisscontact Development Programme, which is co-financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Federal Department of Foreign Affairs FDFA.