"A fundamental challenge for new ventures is overcoming liabilities of newness - particularly, lack of relevant knowledge. Accelerators, intense, time-compressed entrepreneurial programs, attempt to alleviate these liabilities by providing ventures with intensive learning. While accelerators have rapidly emerged as prominent players in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other practitioners have continued to raise questions about their efficacy. Mirroring such concerns, extant organizational theories offer competing predictions about whether and for which ventures accelerator participation might be beneficial. Drawing on hybrid empirical methods that triangulate across multiple quantitative and qualitative analyses, we consistently find evidence that many accelerators do indeed aid and accelerate venture development and that their effects are neither due purely to selection or credentialing. Intriguingly, our results also indicate that accelerator participation complements rather than substitutes for many forms of prior founder experience (e.g., having worked for a company that produces a lot of startups). Overall, we contribute by pioneering work on the nature and outcomes of accelerators, offering insight into the fundamental value of intensive indirect learning (vs direct learning) in new ventures and extending understanding of how organizations may speed products and services to market."

"Innovative start-ups are often considered to be a key source of innovation and job creation. As such they are the subject of several types of supportive public policies. This study examines the short-term and long-term effects of business incubators on the performance of innovative start-ups in terms of sales revenues and job creation. A large sample of N-¯=-¯2544 innovative Italian start-ups, of which 606 were incubated, was followed over a period of up to six years. Tobit and Poisson regressions and propensity-score matching analyses point towards a significant negative effect of incubator tenancy on sales revenues and no significant effect of incubation on job creation. Findings also suggest that the initially negative effect of incubation on sales revenues turns into a positive effect in the long term. The effects of incubator characteristics, in terms of ownership, certification, and size on the growth of tenant start-ups were further analysed, but these effects were found to be negligible. The study contributes to the literature on the evidence-based evaluation of business incubation performance. It suggests that public policy makers should lower their expectations regarding the numbers of new jobs created by business incubation support."

"The objective of this paper is to understand the mechanisms by which development projects facilitate market linkage of smallholder farmers based on panel data from Nicaragua. We find that activities related to entrepreneurial practices have positive and statistically significant effect on commercialization. We also find that increased commercialization is positively correlated with total bean sales income, suggesting a positive indirect effect of the activities. Other activities demonstrate no positive and robust effect on commercialization while direct positive effects on sales income can be observed. This implies that market linkage of smallholder farmers require different sets of intervention tools than traditional farm technical assistance."

"Whether differences among accelerators explain differences in the performance of member ventures is an important and underexplored question. Conversely, are the effects of accelerators so isomorphic, because they copy each other, that ventures from different accelerators report little performance differences? We use variance decomposition analysis to test whether variations in characteristics of accelerators explain performance differences in the ventures that belong to them. Using a sample of 1,442 ventures from 117 accelerator programs across 22 countries, we find that 11.13–14.18% variance of venture performance can be attributed to accelerator membership. Accelerator membership also accounted for 3.00, 5.15, and 16.65% in the variance for employee growth, employee costs, and revenue change, respectively. Our findings suggest that between accelerator differences can make a significant economic difference to venture performance."

"Many organizations around the world implement programs designed to encourage entrepreneurship, including grant prize awards, accelerator programs, incubators, etc. The goal of these programs is to supply entrepreneurs with early-stage support and visibility to help develop ideas and attract capital; but, if capital markets are efficient, good business ideas should find funding anyways. In this paper, I present evidence from the first global- scale, quasi-experimental study of whether entrepreneurship programs improve outcomes for start-up firms. I employ a regression discontinuity design to test whether winners of start- up program competitions perform better ex-post than losers, where the threshold rank for winning the competition provides exogenous variation in program participation. With 460 competitions across 113 countries and over 20,000 competing firms, I find that winning a competitions increases the probability of firm survival by 64%, the total amount of follow-on financing by $260,000 USD, and total employment by 47%, as well as other web-based metrics of firm success. Impacts are driven by medium-size prize competitions, and are precisely estimated both in countries where the costs of starting a business are low and where these costs are high. These results suggest that capital market frictions indeed prohibit start-up growth in many parts of the world."

"Most employment in low and middle income countries is in micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises, governments, non-governmental organizations and donors spend on targeted programs and broader policies to enhance employment creation in these firms. But despite these efforts, not much is known about which of these interventions are really effective. This systematic review synthesizes the existing evidence on the employment impact of these programs. The results show that the effects have so far been very modest."

"Do networks plentiful in ideas provide early stage startups with performance advantages? On the one hand, network positions that provide access to a multitude of ideas are thought to increase team performance. On the other hand, research on network formation argues that such positional advantages should be fleeting as entrepreneurs strategically compete over the most valuable network positions.

Beyond providing causal evidence for the durability of network based performance advantages, these findings provide micro-level support to the importance of knowledge spillovers within bootcamps, accelerators, and startup ecosystems more generally."

"Does growth training help entrepreneurs to scale-up new ventures? Our field experiment answering this question uses a sample of 181 startup founders from the population of Singapore-based entrepreneurs in 2017. The treatment consisted of classroom sessions conducted in workshop and lecture formats that provided content in growth-catalyst tools comprising of effective business model design, building effective venture management teams and leveraging personal networks, that help in entrepreneurial resource mobilization. Also, participants received individualized business coaching addressing their venture's issues and challenges in these domains. Our results show that entrepreneurs that received training in the three growth-catalyst tools achieved higher sales and employee growth for their ventures. In addition, entrepreneurs with higher educational attainment, higher prior work experience and higher growth goals benefited much more from the training intervention."

"Historically, small enterprises have played an important role in technological innovation, often leading to the introduction of paradigm-shifting technologies and changes in the way we live. However, they face many challenges in maturing to a point where they survive and have positive social, environmental and economic impacts. They often have weak entrepreneurial support systems, fragmented linkages to climate technology markets and a lack of finance for entrepreneurial activities. These challenges are exacerbated in developing countries.

This paper identifies the challenges and opportunities for strengthening climate technology incubators and accelerators in developing countries."

"This paper examines the sparse but rapidly growing literature on Business (and Seed) Accelerators. It summarises the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that have been identified by academic authors, and matches each factor to operational and strategic activity within an Accelerator and to theoretical arguments for and against their importance. The aim is to match CSFs with literature from a wider range of disciplines, particularly psychology, sociology, economics, leadership and learning. These each help explain, justify, inform and give a theoretical context to the documented CSFs. The background models, once identified, are useful tools in the planning and analysis of Accelerators."