The impact of acceleration programs on early-stage tech-startups considering the founders’ background

• Autor(a) principal: Ramadas, João Pedro Prazeres
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25499
• topic: Entrepreneurship; Early-stage startups; Tech-based startups; Acceleration programs; Entrepreneurial learning; Exploitative and explorative learning; Empreendedorismo; Startups na fase inicial; Startups tecnológicas; Programas de aceleração; Aprendizagem empreendedora; Aprendizagem exploratória e explorativa; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The growth of tech-startups such as Airbnb and Uber into multibillion-dollar companies has a strong impact on the economy. Yet, 50% of startups close the business within 5 years, which makes it crucial to have support organizations, such as accelerators, to mitigate these failure rates. Accelerators help new ventures with a pre-defined business support. Nonetheless, this business support will be absorbed and implemented at different speeds since founding team members usually have different areas of expertise. Thus, we aim at uncovering the benefits of acceleration programs, what drives those benefits and if the outcomes differ according to the founder’s background – considering their opposite learning types (exploitative vs exploratory). Data was collected through 14 semi-structured interviews and analyzed using inductive thematical analysis. Results suggest that most benefits are business model improvement, key project modifications and business/entrepreneurial knowledge and the drivers are time compression, networking, mentoring and training/curriculum. Concerning the differences related to their backgrounds, views on exploitative and explorative learning find echo in our results as business founders benefit more from networking and only fine-tune their business, while technical founders benefit mainly from mentoring and incur in bigger and more important changes. Further findings indicate accelerators can improve their impact by selecting participants based on their value proposition, focusing on knowledge transferring and in one sector/industry, leveling the startup's stages in each cohort and following-up after the programs. For founders, we recommend a thorough screening of accelerators before applying and a preparation before-hand to get the most value from the programs.