How inter-organizational relationships shape innovation in business accelerators

Abstract

Value emerges from a set of interdependent activities and organizations enabling the focal organization to create value in concert with partners of different kinds. Business accelerators, as organizations where converge a multiplicity of actors with their respective objectives, are immerged in complex inter-organizational and cross sectorial relationships with significant implication for their value proposition. Given the significance of the business model for organizations it is surprising that our knowledge about the funding of these programs and, importantly, how funding sources shape the selection of start-ups aimed to create value for partner organizations, and thus the forms of innovation delivered, is limited. This paper addresses this gap by building on eight months of unique ethnographic fieldwork at a business accelerator combined with 64 semi-structured interviews. The paper analyses how the funding structure based on public and private partnerships shapes the process enabling the focal organization to create and deliver value. When accelerators are traditionally expected to generate technological innovation by accelerating start-ups, results indicate that partner organizations are interested in multiple forms of innovations. The latter are revealed through the analysis of the motivations of these partner organizations to fund the focal organization and an investigation of the challenges raised by the selection process. The outputs of these selection process - the start-ups to be included - result from the embeddedness of partner organizations´ motivations, the challenges emerging during the selection and the alignment strategies used by the acceleration team in the decision-making process. While informing about the multiple forms of innovation at stake in organizations, this paper contributes to our understanding of the impact of inter-organizational relationships on the process of value creation.