About Accelerators

What is an Accelerator?

For traditional businesses, accelerators help organisations to address the liability of newness by providing them with funding, knowledge and networks

Research has confirmed that accelerators do accelerate growth for new ventures - however there is a high variance (Hallen, Bingham and Cohen, 2014)

Accelerators for Social Innovations

The Trinity Centre for Social Innovation define a Social Innovation as the process of creating, and/or developing, and implementing a novel concept, idea or organization, that benefits society (social and/or environmental benefit) and is achieved through community, business, institutional and/or behavioural change.

Accelerators can also benefit social innovations. Social innovations face unique challenges such as “balancing social and economic motives, attracting funding, measuring impact, and navigating a complex institutional landscape “ (Assenova and Bacq, 2023). Accelerators provide answers to some of these issues: funding through grants, mentorship, networking opportunities, and cohort education (Cohen et al., 2019) There is a confirmed causal link between membership of a social impact accelerator and success (Kher, Yang and Newbert, 2022)

Sources:

2050accelerator (2024). 2050accelerator. [online] 2050accelerator. Available at: https://www.2050accelerator.com/.

Assenova, V. and Bacq, S. (2023). Scaling for Good: Do Social Impact Accelerators Propel Social Venture Growth and Development? SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4502946.

Cohen, S., Fehder, D.C., Hochberg, Y.V. and Murray, F. (2019). The design of startup accelerators. Research Policy, 48(7), pp.1781–1797. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.04.003.

Hallen, B.L., Bingham, C.B. and Cohen, S.L. (2014) ‘Do Accelerators Accelerate? A Study of Venture Accelerators as a Path to Success’, Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, 2014(1), pp. 747–752. doi:10.5465/AMBPP.2014.185.

Kher, R., Yang, S. and Newbert, S.L. (2022). Accelerating emergence: the causal (but contextual) effect of social impact accelerators on nascent for-profit social ventures. Small Business Economics. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-022-00680-z.

Y Combinator (2019). Y Combinator. [online] Ycombinator.com. Available at: https://www.ycombinator.com/.

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