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Coordinator: Violetta Gerasymenko, Oregon State U.
Session Chair: Gary Dushnitsky, London Business School
Presenter: Sandy Yu, U. of Minnesota
Presenter: Elena Kulchina, North Carolina State U.
Presenter: Ronit Yitshaki, Department of Economics and Business Administration, Ariel U.
Presenter: Matthias Wenzel, Leuphana U. Lüneburg
Presenter: Shelly Lev-Koren, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Presenter: Miriam Erez, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Presenter: Susan L. Cohen, U. of Georgia
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| Over the past decade, accelerators have become an important feature of the global entrepreneurial landscape. This has led to a growing body of research that examines the types and organization of these accelerators and their contributions to the growth and scaling activities of start-ups. Researchers have examined how accelerators provide a forum for knowledge creation, technology development, commercialization, and new business model development. This research underscores the importance of accelerators for new ventures' strategic decisions such as funding, timing of exits, scaling up strategies and technology commercialization. Moreover, it highlights the opportunity to leverage the accelerator setting to study canonical questions in entrepreneurship. We will illustrate and discus the opportunities to broaden this stream of research by: (1) discussing the effects of accelerators on the emergence of entrepreneurial identity around the world that is detached from socio-historical contexts, (2) considering different venture-specific factors that determine the extent to which ventures will benefit from participation in accelerators and namely (a) the breadth of their prior experience and (b) their relative positioning within a cohort of other accelerator-sponsored start-ups (3) re-examining the effects of different mechanisms of accelerators such as funding, networking, mentorship, and others on ventures’ performance and (4) identifying lessons for generating novel theory from novel phenomena such as entrepreneurial accelerators. The focus on the founders, their agency, and the role of accelerators across and beyond different contexts are key themes throughout the discussion. It falls squarely in line with the 2022 AOM theme "Creating a better world together." |
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