Unlocking Growth in Rwandan MSMEs: Entrepreneurial Leadership, Innovation Intensity, and Access to Finance – An Open Science Initiative

This Open Science Framework (OSF) project curates and disseminates all materials for the ongoing publication series that investigates how entrepreneurial leadership behaviours interact with innovation intensity and credit conditions to shape the growth trajectories of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Rwanda. Building on the integrative model outlined in “Leadership, Innovation, and Growth Trajectories in Rwandan MSMEs: An Integrative Model under Credit Constraints” Rise Think Thank Research Paper… , the project combines the Resource-Based View, Dynamic Capabilities, and Transformational Leadership Theory to explain firm-level performance in sub-Saharan Africa. The repository will host cleaned and documented micro-data drawn from the 2024 FinScope MSME Survey and the 2025 Integrated Business Enterprise Survey, reproducible R and Python code for econometric and mediation analyses, pre-registered hypotheses, step-by-step methodological protocols, conference posters, and all successive preprints and journal articles. By making these assets openly available, the project supports transparent, replicable research on topics such as entrepreneurial leadership, informal and formal innovation, credit constraints, inclusive industrialisation, and sustainable development. Scholars, policymakers, and practitioners interested in African SME finance, innovation ecosystems, or leadership development can reuse the datasets, adapt the code, or collaborate on comparative studies across emerging economies. Keywords: Rwanda, MSME growth, entrepreneurial leadership, innovation intensity, access to finance, credit constraints, transformational leadership, dynamic capabilities, Resource-Based View, open data, replication, sub-Saharan Africa, sustainable development.