Driving innovative solutions for small businesses: Reflections from our first Strive Innovation Fund

Digital technology plays a big role in supporting the resilience and growth of small businesses around the world. Solutions can enable small business owners to learn new skills, gain access to financial services, and participate more fully in digital marketplaces. In 2022, Mastercard Strive kicked off our first Innovation Fund, awarding $1 million to eight enterprises to rapidly develop and test innovative digital and data-first solutions for supporting small business growth at scale.

Now that the projects from the Innovation Fund have wrapped up, we’ve had a chance to reflect on some of the biggest achievements and insights we observed.

Achievements of the Strive Innovation Fund

The eight Innovation Fund winners designed and delivered digital and data-first solutions that reached more than 52,000 small businesses across seven countries. The Innovation Fund also sought to seed additionality by enabling our partners to try out experimental techniques to drive scale in a relatively low-risk manner, which may not have otherwise been feasible. For instance, five winners signed new partnerships or secured investments after receiving an Innovation Fund grant. Additionally, we saw important outcomes from the projects:

• Advancing capabilities: Over 10,000 small businesses consumed upskilling and financial education content from five Innovation Fund winners.
• Integrating business best practices: More than 100 women entrepreneurs in Nigeria adopted self-ordering and used insights and nudges from Boost Technology.
• Adopting digital products and services: More than 2,500 small businesses increased their adoption of digital tools and credit products. These include digital credit products in Cambodia, Colombia, and Nigeria, payment tools in the Philippines, Internet of Things–enabled machinery in Kenya, and social media and social commerce apps in Mexico.
• Enhancing business resilience: Small businesses gained access to new credit opportunities and digital solutions, allowing them to pivot and respond to changing consumer preferences.
• Increasing business efficiency: After adopting Strive-funded solutions, small businesses saved time managing their businesses, getting trained, managing inventory, and processing transactions.
• Business growth: Two Innovation Fund winners found examples of owners growing their businesses (sales and revenue) after adopting Strive-funded services. In time, we hope this will increase as solutions become more widely used.

Partnerships, high-touch support, and bundled solutions are central to supporting small businesses

Across our global portfolio of partners, we observed a few important insights, which helped lead to positive outcomes for Innovation Fund winners and small businesses alike.

• Strong, pre-established partnerships are central to how organizations engage with small businesses to drive impact. Collaborating with partners enabled organizations in our Innovation Fund to achieve their objectives. Every organization involved worked with strategic partners to deliver their programs and reach an audience of small businesses. However, we found that organizations without pre-established strategic partnerships took slightly longer to achieve their goals.
• High-touch approaches are still needed with micro-enterprises to build trust and engagement. Whether delivered digitally or in person, high-touch engagement with small businesses was required to build trust in the products and solutions offered by Innovation Fund winners before committing to them. Boost Technology found that, for some women-owned small businesses, sales representatives were critical to establishing the legitimacy of digital nudges they had received. They used in-person visits from sales representatives to build trust and capacity, especially in regions less familiar with digital tools.
• Digital upskilling content needs to be relevant, accessible, short, and ideally bundled with digital products and services to generate more meaningful outcomes for small businesses. Innovation Fund winners found that small business owners have a preference for upskilling content that is peer-focused, uses accessible language, has few (if any) barriers to access, videos that are short and to the point (less than one-and-a-half minutes), and builds on existing digital skills and practices.

These insights are important lessons for Strive, and we’ve already integrated them into the projects underway in the current Innovation Fund and other programs. We’re proud of the achievements of our Innovation Fund winners, who expanded or accelerated support to new small business segments and developed products that support new business models. By working together, we strengthen small businesses and unleash their full potential to catalyze inclusive growth.