When Bureaucrats Meet Entrepreneurs: The Design of Effective `Public Venture Capital' Programmes

Abstract

Recently public efforts to finance small high‐technology firms have proliferated. We review the motivations for these efforts and make some preliminary observations about their design. We explore the underlying challenges that the financing of young growth firms poses, the ways that specialised financial intermediaries address them, and the rationales for public efforts to finance these companies. The final section makes a set of observations about the ways in which the structure of these efforts can most effectively complement private sector activity. A frequent fault in programme design is the presumption that technological criteria can be divorced from business considerations when evaluating firms.