Social entrepreneurship has a proven track record of helping to increase climate resilience among those already living in poverty. Miller Center accelerates promising social enterprises to optimize their impact and business performance potential. That said, it’s quite difficult to measure the impact of acceleration on an enterprise’s growth because we can’t observe what would’ve happened to that same enterprise without the acceleration program. Yet, knowing the impact of acceleration has important implications for the ecosystem.
In an effort to move beyond case studies and anecdotal data, Miller Center has leveraged data and creative research methodologies to try to measure the impact of its accelerator with funding support from Chevron. Using the 2021 Climate Resilience Asia Pacific Accelerator cohort as a guide, we created a comparable cohort from our alumni database and measured their growth since graduating. As Miller Center gets more rigorous in our impact measurement and data collection, we will be able to publish more data driven research that validates the impact and potential of acceleration and social entrepreneurship. Furthermore, in three years we will be able to check if the current 2021 Climate Resilience Asia Pacific Accelerator program actually scaled at the predicted rate of this paper!
