Abstract

The recent phenomenon of corporate accelerators is an excellent opportunity for incumbent companies to participate in promising innovations from startups all over the globe. Incumbent companies introduce structured accelerator programs for cohorts of startups, which in turn benefit from resources, mentoring and networks. The underlying research analyzes the growing interdisciplinary scientific literature on corporate accelerators to shed light on this uprising topic. We conducted a literature review according to the guideline of Webster and Watson (2002) by analyzing 20 scientific references. The results show that researchers applied qualitative methods to explore accelerators in detail and quantitative methods are used to analyze secondary data on startups and accelerators. Overall, most findings of recent research are of exploratory nature and our results summaries the main findings of the articles. Finally, we extracted a list of success factors for incumbent companies running corporate accelerators as well as for startups participating in such programs. In terms of theoretical impact, the articles analyzed apply open innovation theory, the resource based view and institutional theory to explain corporate accelerators. Our study reveals that Information Systems research has so far neglected to conduct studies researching corporate accelerators although the findings of our review show large potential for future research.

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