ACCELERATORS - CATEGORIZING A NEW FORM OF COOPERATION

Accelerators have helped over 6,000 start-ups, such as Airbnb and Dropbox, throughout their earliest stages. Those ventures went on to raise more than $26bn in follow-on investments (Christiansen 2017). As more and more corporates, universities, venture capitalists and others are joining the club and initiating their own accelerators in different ways and with different goals, a variety of different configurational options of accelerators exist on the market. Most research focused on the categorization of the different types of accelerators, either by their sponsors (Cohen et al. 2018), their motivation (Pauwels et al. 2016), or their business model (Malek et al. 2014). Notwithstanding the difficult data situation about accelerator programs some authors did quantitative analyses on the effectiveness of these accelerator types. Still, there seems to be a lack of understanding to which extend configurational factors of accelerators are contributing to start-ups success (Dempwolf et al. 2014). The aim of this paper is to establish a model of the major contributors of accelerators, which according to a literature review on open innovation studies (e.g. Cohen and Hochberg 2014; Weiblen and Chesbrough 2015; Kanbach and Stubner 2016) influence start-ups success. Further the paper wants to attribute the main configurational factors of accelerator programs, which might indicate the strength of accelerators' contribution to start-ups' success. The results of this literature review offer a definition of three main contributors of accelerators to start-up success, i.e. reputation, co-creation and networking. In addition, the most prominent configurational factors effecting these contributors are identified and explained.