Multilevel Intermediaries: Entrepreneur-Incumbent Interactions in Sustainability Transitions

Abstract

Accelerators are emerging as important intermediaries in innovation management and new venture creation. Despite a large body of work examining innovation intermediaries, there is still a relatively limited understanding of the specific meso-level interactions of how acceleration takes place as niche entrepreneurs interact with the existing incumbent market regime. This is especially true for complex sectors associated with entrepreneurship and grand challenges, such as clean energy and climate change. We apply the multilevel perspective (MLP) from the sociotechnical transitions literature to the role of innovation intermediaries to explore how accelerators mediate interactions between niche entrepreneurs and incumbent regime firms. We apply this framing to a detailed case study of a major multinational accelerator in the clean energy sector. The paper describes the specific ‘input-interfacing-output’ processes that enable niche-regime collaborative interactions, in contrast to presumptions of competitive dynamics. The paper contributes to understanding how accelerators play an important role as a ‘multileveled intermediary’, iteratively and collaboratively enabling dynamic interactions between new ventures and existing firms. We conclude with a conceptual approach for understanding multileveled approach of intermediaries in supporting entrepreneurship for sustainability transitions.