In addition to the resources that I have found very useful through the Business Figths Poverty network I also reviewed more that 50 sources including:
- Papers & Presentations from various development; corporate; philanthropic and institutional (e,g, World Bank; IOL) sources
- African & Asian Networks (e.g. LEDNA & SBC Network & Entrepreneurship Development)
- Government Donors (e.g. Irish Aid & DFID)
- UN General Assembly
- Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship,
I adopted the same research methodology as t used for ICT in Development (which supported a successful 7-figure funding application).
There were two objectives for this research:
1. Identifying the various elements that are required to design a successful enterprise development programme; ranging from Needs Analysis & Solution Design to Programme Management and Monitoring & Evaluation (Development Value Chain)
Within this I focused on the four stages of enterprise (business) development:
- Business Idea: the basic concept for initiating an enterprise
- Business model: how will this business idea actually generate revenues
- Business Case: is the potential return (profit) appropriate for the necessary expenditure (costs) to achieve this return
- Business Plan: hat actions will we take, what decisions will we make, what finance do we need in order to start the business (Note : the business plan is a combination of business idea, model, case plus plan)
In addition to a re-usable research log (where I have itemised all of the relevant aspects of the literature and categorised them for easy searching & sorting in the future) I designed an Enterprise Development Programme Design/Assessment tool – a question-based tool, with guidance notes, to assist in either designing a programme/proposal or in assessing an existing programme as part of ongoing management, monitoring & evaluation.
2. The second objective was to help me in development an Enterprise & Entrepreneurship Development Programme, based on work that I have been doing over the past year with a number of development organisations here in Ireland.
Based on a proven enterprise & entrepreneurship development model here in Ireland; the County Enterprise Boards (CEBs), I was able to design a 3 year programme, using the Logical Framework. In addition to the “end-2-end” Development management processes I have also incorporated a policy-based (macro) set of objectives as wells as enterprise-led (micro) objectives
