Valuable Start-ups

This chapter is about how the staff and corporate partners select entrepreneurs. The different interests and goals of these partners, alongside the lack of shared evaluation criteria, and diverging understandings of what social impact means and why it matters, challenge this process. By following the staff during interviews with short-listed entrepreneurs on selection committees, I uncover what makes an early-stage impact enterprise worth accelerating. I complexify the primacy of social and economic values in impact entrepreneurship to suggest that what makes impact enterprises valuable is eminently plural. I unearth five evaluation criteria: problem-solving capability, maturity, technical innovation, social impact, and network capability. I argue that their interplay informs the worth of a social impact start-up and conveys use, technical, social, and relational values. These values form an “ensemblage of worth,” revealing that an impact enterprise has no intrinsic worth; its worth is socially constructed during evaluation.