Navigating technological complexity and risk: How mentorship shapes entrepreneurial learning in accelerators

This article examines how technological complexity and risk awareness amongst startups shapes entrepreneurial learning, operationalised as proactive information search, and investigates mentorship as a contingency that conditions this relationship. Using two-wave survey data from 75 startup teams in a leading accelerator, we find that both technological complexity and risk awareness increase entrepreneurial learning. However, these effects are contingent on mentorship engagement. Mentorship enhances learning when technological complexity and risk awareness are low to moderate, but its marginal contribution diminishes if either of these increases. This indicates a substitution effect in which external guidance replaces rather than reinforces internally driven learning stimuli. By adopting a contingency perspective, we challenge the assumption that mentorship uniformly benefits early-stage ventures and instead, positions it as a contextual resource whose value depends on its alignment with the founder’s cognitive conditions. Practically, the results highlight the value of adaptive mentorship frameworks that balance guidance with the independent exploration undertaken by entrepreneurs to improve learning and venture progress.