LOOKING BACK TO SPEED FORWARD: THE ORIGINS, EVOLUTION, AND PATH FORWARD FOR CORPORATE ACCELERATOR RESEARCH

Corporate venturing (CV) plays a fundamental role in the strategic renewal of established companies. In the past decade, Corporate Accelerator (CA) programs have increasingly been adopted across industries as a more radical CV form of corporate experimentation. Yet, academic research on CAs is in its infancy, with a nascent but growing body of work only emerging over the past 5-6 years. This aims to accelerate CA research in academia by understanding the roots, and evolution of extant literature, and drawing a path for the future. We examine the scholar origins of CV research tracing the way from its roots to the nascence of CAs in 2016 and beyond. Along this track, we map the core literature, identifying main academic contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes across CV intermediaries so as to provide an organizing framework for the emerging field of CA. We do this by applying a structured mixed method literature review from 1981-2021, combining bibliometric analyses (co-citation and citation analysis) with a subsequent detailed qualitative analysis, following a CIMO (context, intermediary, mechanism, outcome) inductive framework. Through this process, we offer a framework and agenda with specific topics for future CA research.