The Effects of a Training Program to Encourage Social Entrepreneurship

We use two sequential RCTs to study the impact of a twice-executed six-month intensive training program costing about 12,000 euros per participant to encourage social entrepreneurship among youth. The first year training effort provided no robust treatment effects. Results were used to redesign and improve the training. The second year effort provided treatment effects on venture actions, venture creation, one leadership characteristic, one non-cognitive skill, and on subsequent work experience in startups. For both interventions, those that had made more progress prior to the start of the program, made more progress afterwards, irrespective of treatment. Those having the highest pre-treatment expectations, and the highest selectivity scores made the least progress, irrespective of treatment. Training people to learn entrepreneurship seems to be difficult and costly, but repeated field-experiments can serve to increase the impact of entrepreneurship training.