Financing innovation in the developing world

Financing innovation remains a challenging undertaking. While it is not only a societal aspiration, but also an economic requirement, the necessary financial products and institutions to provide the much-needed funding to turn valuable ideas into marketable assets are insufficiently developed. This holds even more true in developing countries, where innovators face the twin challenges of managing the risks associated with doing something different and being unable to tap in a wide range of institutional investors because capital markets are insufficiently developed.