Exploring the impact of accelerator programs on startup success: A focus on corporate collaboration and goal achievement

Start-up corporation collaboration is a phenomenon that is becoming more and more noticeable in the marketplace. Start-ups perceive such partnerships as an opportunity to scale up their solutions (products/services), while corporations open up to young companies to explore new business models. Understanding the collaboration goals is vital to secure collaboration benefits for each party. It seems interesting to find out to what extent this type of collaboration is critical to the start-ups, to what extent the corporate collaboration goals are defined, and if they are achieved. Therefore, diffusion of innovation theory and social network theory appear as a capable theoretical lens for analysing how 15 defined goals that start-ups use to guide them through establishing collaboration with corporations and verifying partnerships in the context of the adopted goals. The impact of the start-ups' experience on the perceived significance of the goals and their attainment level was examined. Moreover, a clear difference in the perception of expectations and the level of attainment of the set goals of partnership with corporations depending on the company development phase was highlighted, and it was presented how start-up awareness grows along with start-up development and the approach of start-ups to the studied variables changes. • The start-up development phase was not significantly associated with the level of attainment of the set goals. • For start-ups the key collaboration goals are as follows: a) obtaining gaining referral sales of offered products, services; b) an option of product or service development in collaboration with a large business partner; c) verification of market fit of the offered solution; d) corporate assistance in connection with product/MVP testing. • The key goals include those that translate more quickly into sales and faster product or service market launch. • The level of attained goals is related to an option of their attainment in the short term. It is definitely easier to achieve short-term goals (e.g. developing or testing a product and MVP) than those that require more time (e.g. foreign market launches or acquisition). • For some of the start-ups, which thanks to acceleration programmes work with large companies for the first time, there is a disappointment resulting from a lack of understanding of the processes and timeframe in which large companies operate.