Accelerating into Control

Abstract

confident than non-entrepreneurs. While it may help entrepreneurs persevere in the face of potential business failure, we cannot mistake their confidence for always knowing what to do with their business idea. Entrepreneurs in fact seek out mentors and other useful connections to help them succeed throughout the growth of their businesses, particularly at the start. Many entrepreneurs seek advice informally and in a piecemeal manner, but some seek more formal assistance through structured or semi-structured entrepreneurship programs. Indeed, we currently are witnessing the rise of the “support ecosystem,” which offers a plethora of entrepreneurship education and training programs. These programs vary in their design and operation; some, for example, are run by universities and colleges, some are offered by nonprofits or the government, and others are offered by for-profit entities. They might operate just a weekend in length, or last several months or years. The scope of a program’s intervention and how closely it works with each entrepreneur or startup varies widely. With this increase in the number and scope of program offerings, we wonder if adoption is outpacing evidence of their effectiveness. In this article, we examine various types of programs, with a primary focus on the accelerator, provide some context for current research and research concepts in this area, and discuss some implications of collecting data for program operators and policymakers. We begin by defining the accelerator: Accelerators are organizations that provide cohorts of selected nascent ventures seed-investment, usually in exchange for equity, and limited-duration educational programming, including extensive mentorship and structured educational components. These programs typically culminate in “demo days” where the ventures make pitches to an audience of qualified investors. For the purpose of this article, we distinguish between accelerators and incubators. While some use the two terms interchangeably, we see them as distinct categories. Incubators lack a mentoring component and have been around for much longer than accelerators. Like other education and training programs, accelerators are also on the rise. We argue that research is lacking in entrepreneurship education generally, and specifically on accelerators, which means from a research perspective we cannot say many definitive things about this type of program. We don’t have concrete evidence of their value. This does not mean we seek to deride accelerators or other