Stanford Social Innovation Review features AMI in ‘Pacing Entrepreneurs to Success’ Article
20th July 2022
In the 2022 summer edition of Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), the African Management Institute (AMI) was featured in the article “Pacing Entrepreneurs to Success”. The article looks at how entrepreneurial support organisations, “called pacers are helping businesses in emerging markets achieve their goals by providing services for them in the long run.”
“Enabling ambitious entrepreneurs to thrive is not a ‘hit-and-run’ exercise,” said AMI CEO and co-founder Rebecca Harrison in response to the article. “It’s about journeying with entrepreneurial teams over time, and ‘pacing’ them to develop the skills and habits to take their businesses to the next level.
This is a reminder that ambitious entrepreneurs and businesses, especially across Africa, thrive when there’s an ecosystem of “pacers” supporting bold innovators and the next generation of business leaders to go the distance and conquer the great challenges of our time.”
Authored by Sonali V. Rammohan, Tim Weiss, Darius Teter and Jesper B. Sørensen, the article, features AMI alongside prominent entrepreneur support organisations and businesses – Y Combinator, Endeavor, Entrepreneur Organization, Unreasonable Group, Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance (Harambeans) and AMI partners at Stanford Seed:
In this article, [SSIR] offer a blueprint of pacemaker organizations by drawing on the experiences of half a dozen such organizations…We explain the type of long-term—even lifetime—value pacers deliver to entrepreneurs, outlining their organizational structures, providing options for how other entrepreneur support organizations may wish to put the blueprint into practice, and showcasing some of the challenges that pacers currently face.
Our enthusiasm about pacemakers derives in part from our respective roles as organizational leaders of Stanford Seed and academic researchers. The pacer model has not yet been formalized and has evolved largely in a self-directed and organic way. But information now exists to begin formalizing the model and launching an industry-wide conversation, creating a stronger alignment across pacers and encouraging other entrepreneur support organizations to embrace pacer practices and address the service gap.
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