Improving Business Practices and the Boundary of the Entrepreneur: A Randomized Experiment Comparing Training, Consulting, Insourcing, and Outsourcing
在尼日利亚的随机实验中，比较了培训、咨询、内包和外包四种方式对改善小企业商业实践的效果，发现内包和外包优于培训，且成本仅为咨询的一半，能促进数字营销、创新和销售利润增长。
Many small firms lack the finance and \n marketing skills needed for firm growth. The standard \n approach in many business support programs is to attempt to \n train the entrepreneur to develop these skills, through \n classroom-based training or personalized consulting. \n However, rather than requiring the entrepreneur to be a \n jack-of-all-trades, an alternative is to move beyond the \n boundary of the entrepreneur and link firms to these skills \n in a marketplace through insourcing workers with functional \n expertise or outsourcing tasks to professional specialists. \n A randomized experiment in Nigeria tests the relative \n effectiveness of these four different approaches to \n improving business practices. Insourcing and outsourcing \n both dominate business training; and do at least as well as \n business consulting at one-half of the cost. Moving beyond \n the entrepreneurial boundary enables firms to use higher \n quality digital marketing practices, innovate more, and \n achieve greater sales and profits growth over a two-year horizon.