The Accelerator as an Organizational Form: A Review and Reconceptualization

Abstract

While the widespread phenomenon of the business or seed accelerator has enjoyed increasing attention amongst scholars, the lack of a coherent and theoretically grounded understanding of this organizational form constrains the cumulativeness and transferability of findings. By drawing on a systematic literature review, we identify four distinct research orientations on the accelerator: organizational learning and adaptation, entrepreneurial finance, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and corporate innovation and entrepreneurship. We compare and contrast these orientations along the organizational features that they attribute to the accelerator and synthesize them into an integrative typology. We further distinguish the accelerator from other established organizational forms in the entrepreneurial support landscape and develop a research agenda that contributes to integration of the literature by building bridges between the different research orientations and linking the concept to established theories.

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