What Do Accelerators Do? Insights from Incubators and Angels

By Susan L. Cohen. Innovations Technology Governance Globalization, 2013

315 citations recorded by the source corpus.

their initial products, identify promising customer segments, and secure resources, including capital and employees. More specifically, accelerator programs are programs of limited-duration—lasting about three months—that help cohorts of startups with the new venture process. They usually provide a small amount of seed capital, plus working space. They also offer a plethora of networking opportunities, with both peer ventures and mentors, who might be successful entrepreneurs, program graduates, venture capitalists, angel investors, or even corporate executives. Finally, most programs end with a grand event, a “demo day” where ventures pitch to a large audience of qualified investors. You may think this all sounds familiar. After all, don’t incubators and angel investors help nascent ventures? Accelerators certainly are similar to incubators and angel investors. Like them, accelerators aim to help nascent ventures during the formation stage. Thus we might expect that many of the activities provided by accelerators would also be provided by angels and incubators. But accelerators differ in several ways. Perhaps the most fundamental difference is the limited duration of accelerator programs as compared to the continuous nature of incubators and angel investments. This one small difference leads to many other differences, as I discuss in more detail below. (See table 1 for a summary of the differences between incubators, angel investors, and accelerators.)

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

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Citations in the corpus

Corporate Accelerators As Recent Form Of Startup Engagement: The What, The Why, And The How (2016, background): “Furthermore, they provide various services, such as office space, mentoring, training, and networking opportunities, in addition to investment capital for startups (Cohen, 2013; Hallen, Bingham, & Cohen, 2014; Hochberg, 2015; Hoffmann & RadojevichKelley, 2012; Malek, Maine, & McCarthy, 2014).”
Strengthening science, technology, and innovation-based incubators to help achieve Sustainable Development Goals: Lessons from India (2020, unknown): “…receive varying levels of assistance from public funding bodies and provide long duration support for startups (up to five years) to help the conversion of individual early stage, high-risk ideas to marketable enterprises (Cohen, 2013; Dee et al., 2011; Hackett and Dilts, 2004; Mian et al., 2016).”
Corporate accelerators: Building bridges between corporations and startups (2016, background): “Today’s corporate accelerators are distinct from the business incubators of the 1950s and the startup factories of the late 1990s (Cohen, 2013; Trotter, 2013).”
Accelerator expertise: Understanding the intermediary role of accelerators in the development of the Bangalore entrepreneurial ecosystem (2018, background): “Despite significant progress toward understanding the structural (what) elements of accelerators—such as their components (Cohen, 2013b; Gonzalez-Uribe and Leatherbee, 2015; Mejia and Gopal, 2015) and purposes (Clarysse, Wright and VanHove, 2015; Yusubova and Clarysse, 2016)—there remains a limited…”
The Role of Accelerator Designs in Mitigating Bounded Rationality in New Ventures (2018, background): “Accelerators seek to aid the development of early-stage ventures by providing intensive mentoring and education over short, fixed-length periods to cohorts of ventures (Cohen, 2013; Cohen and Hochberg, 2014).”
What signals matter for social startups? It depends: The influence of gender role congruity on social impact accelerator selection decisions (2019, background): “…(Cohen and Hochberg, 2014), these accelerators are designed to help emerging ventures of all kinds define their ideas, build initial prototypes, identify promising customer segments, form relationships with external investors and industry experts, etc., all in a compressed time frame (Cohen, 2013).”
The Effects of Business Accelerators on Venture Performance: Evidence from Start-Up Chile (2017, background): “The first stream focuses on conceptual descriptions of the accelerator model (Bernthal 2015; Cohen 2013; Cohen and Hochberg 2014; Kim and Wagman 2014; Radojevich-Kelley and Hoffman 2012).”
How open is innovation? A retrospective and ideas forward (2021, background): “Hence, the emergence of corporate accelerators to attract talent, develop ideas, and build companies (Cohen, 2013).”