Přepracování programu podnikového akcelerátoru tak, aby byl v souladu se strategickými cíli mateřské firmy

Corporate accelerators (CAs) are “company-supported programs of limited duration that support cohorts of startups during the new venture process via mentoring, education, and company-specific resources” (Kohler, 2016: p.2). The objectives of CAs are manifold and may include trend spotting, technology scouting, enhancing corporate innovation, initiating collaborations, and ecosystem building which are not always subject to equity involvement that is often pursued by independent accelerators (Banc and Messeghem, 2020; Kanbach and Stubner, 2016; Kohler, 2016; Shankar and Shepherd, 2018).

Due to the fact that CAs are a recent phenomenon, empirical studies are nascent (Kohler, 2016). Research has identified different CA types and highlighted their influence on parent company and broader ecosystem (Kanbach and Stubner, 2016; Pauwels et al., 2015; Shankar and Shepherd, 2018; Veit at al. 2021). However, whether expected outcomes are obtained have not been investigated sufficiently by management scholars (Richter et al., 2017; Wojick et al., 2020).

Since empirical research on the subject is scarce, my initial IGA project in 2023 shed light on underlying mechanisms and tangible outcomes of a CA program from open innovation perspective. The CA program is called the Workup and has been initiated by Işbank, the largest Turkish private bank. Adopting an action oriented single case study with explorative notion, I have analyzed the phenomenon in-depth by incorporating views from multiple stakeholders. My case study has been built on extensive data from 40 interviews and participatory observations. In addition to monitoring a cohort of the CA program from the selection phase till the demo day and capturing live data in the field, I interviewed multiple actors of the ecosystem engaged in the program including the corporate team, the acceleration team, startup founders, jury members, mentors, and investors. Research findings indicate that the CA I investigated reflects the characteristics of an ecosystem builder type of CAs (Pauwels et al., 2015) and falls in accelerating venture emergence pathway (Shankar and Shepherd, 2018).

However, I also found out that the corporate executives expected that their CA program should support the corporate strategic goals better. Therefore, I see research opportunity to extend the initial project by collecting best practices from other CA programs including Plug and Play, Techstars etc. and suggest the redesign of the CA program. This new proposal aims to analyze the problems and bottlenecks of the program further and redesign the structure, content, and value proposition in order to align it better with the strategic objectives of the parent company. The main research question is how a CA can be redesigned to support strategic objectives of its parent firm? I aim to adopt qualitative research method to collect additional data and analyse them together with the data already collected.