Role of accelerators in innovation ecosystems: The case of New Zealand

Abstract

This article aims to examine the evolution of the business accelerators and their impact in New Zealand over the course of last decade to develop a better understanding of the role accelerators have played within the New Zealand innovation ecosystem, their influence on the innovation community and how accelerators measure their success. An exploratory qualitative study was undertaken which mainly draws from semi-structured interviews with mentors, participants and senior executives of accelerator programs. Secondary data were collected from presentations on YouTube, consultancy reports and internal reporting to provide context for the interviewee’s perspective. New Zealand with its remote geographical location, distinct company environment and its uniqueness within the wider business environment and institutional configuration provides a novel context to this study. The findings indicate that after more than a decade of operations, long-term outcome and benefits of accelerators to New Zealand innovation ecosystem are still unclear.

Unleashing Knowledge Sharing in Emerging Economy Startups: A Multilevel Analysis

“…The interviews reveal that the integration of the team, both within and outside the work environment, plays a significant role in influencing knowledge sharing among employees. This observation supports Blair's perspective [14] that individuals tend to prioritise sharing information with peers whom they trust.…”

“…The critical outcomes reported were enhanced networking opportunities through incubation and acceleration programs, facilitating expanding connections [100]. Access to technical knowledge, capital, partnership market contacts, and customer acquisition was commonly mentioned [14,24,101]. This empirical study investigated various factors influencing knowledge acquisition and sharing across domains, consolidating previously explored findings.…”

“…As newly established and high-tech companies, startups play a crucial role as primary drivers of organisational innovation by identifying the demand for product development in lucrative target markets [2,5,14,24]. Although different in nature or objectives, these organisations emerge with the similar purpose of aggressively growing their businesses in markets understood as highly scalable [25].…”

La cooperación de corporaciones públicas con empresas privadas de nueva creación en todas las etapas de su ciclo de vida

“…Sin embargo, también deben recalibrar sus mecanismos internos y estructuras organizativas para adaptarse mejor a los requisitos iniciales. Esta adaptabilidad adquiere una mayor importancia después de la culminación de la fase de aceleración, ya que los programas exitosos a menudo enfrentan la rigidez de los procedimientos corporativos por primera vez (Blair et al, 2020).…”

Technology rewind: The emergence of the analog entrepreneurial ecosystem

“…institutions, values, narratives) that extend beyond firm, industry, and sectoral boundaries (Adner, 2017; Dattée et al, 2018; Ganco et al, 2020; Jacobides et al, 2018; Sharmelly and Ray, 2018; Shipilov and Gawer, 2020). The ecosystem lens is especially prevalent in studies of entrepreneurship with scholars acknowledging that entrepreneurial activity does not occur in a vacuum but depends on networks of interacting agents and systems of material, social, and cultural forces (Berger and Kuckertz, 2016; Blair et al, 2020; Nair et al, 2020; Roundy et al, 2017; Spigel, 2017; Theodoraki et al, 2018). Studies have primarily focused on the ecosystems that support disruptive innovation (Chandra and Yang, 2011) in new industries, markets, and categories such as cryptocurrency (Fisch, 2019), mobile payments (Ozcan and Santos, 2015), independent power (Sine et al, 2005), and social investing (McDonald and Eisenhardt, 2020).…”