Over the past 15 years, accelerators emerged as a popular and distinct new form of intermediary organization, playing a key role in supporting entrepreneurial and innovation activities. To date, despite significant growth in accelerators research, there is still little understanding of how different forms of accelerators operate, and what outcomes they produce across different contexts. This paper reviews the existing scholarly research on accelerators using the Context-Intervention-Mechanism-Outcome framework and is based on the analysis of 98 research papers on accelerators published in the last 15 years. The analysis identifies four mechanisms which explain how accelerators operate and the role they play in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation: the validation of ideas and products; the provision of product development and models learning; the provision of support to increase startups' market access & growth; and the provision of support for innovation. The paper identifies the methodological and theoretical gaps in current research and provides avenues to support future research and industry practice.

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Technology transfer is a fashionable term, a window towards improved processes, and also a huge part of business strategies meant to ensure competitive advantage, progress, and nonetheless, novelty for companies around the world. Due to its relevance and wide applicability, its associated concepts are even more important as they describe how technology transfer works and they also predict how technology transfer will evolve in the future. The purpose of this paper is to present the concepts used in association with technology transfer and consequently to surpass the shortcomings of existing research. Concepts as technology transfer, technology learning, diffusion of innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer, marketing of research are placed in the context of technology transfer, based on a detailed literature review that we have performed.

Recent literature has focused increasingly on software ecosystems and digital platforms. Digital platforms, as the foundation that supports software ecosystems’ development, have reshaped the traditional business models by focusing more on new dimensions such as stakeholders instead of customers and suppliers, or value co-creation instead of value creation. Software ecosystems contribute significantly to how business is conducted around the world. By performing an overview of recent literature published in Web of Science top academic journals, our paper presents a bibliometric co-occurrence and co-authorship analysis of both software ecosystems and digital platforms. The results show that software ecosystems and digital platforms research collide based on the key words co-occurrence analysis under a certain degree, underlying the evolution of the two topics towards platform ecosystem and platform economy research in recent years.