Accelerating NSW is the first comprehensive mapping of all NSW’s CAISH entities, drawing on 64 in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and CAISH managers and featuring 27 CAISH case studies. The report:

Accelerators are entrepreneurial programs that attempt to help ventures learn, often utilizing extensive consultation with mentors, program directors, customers, guest speakers, alumni and peers. While accelerators have rapidly emerged as prominent players in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and academics continue to raise questions about their efficacy. Moreover, relevant organizational literature suggests that even if accelerators are associated with better venture outcomes, results could be due to mechanisms other than learning, such as sorting or signaling.
Do business accelerators affect new venture performance? This paper investigates this question in the context of Start-Up Chile, an ecosystem accelerator. It focuses on two treatment conditions typically found in business accelerators: basic services of funding and coworking space, and additional entrepreneurship schooling. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper shows that schooling bundled with basic services can significantly increase new venture performance. In contrast, the paper finds no evidence that basic services affect performance on their own.

The expected standards for business support evaluation, ensuring comparability across programmes is maximised.

Combining some of the best insights, tools, frameworks and strategies to come out of the Frontier Incubators program, this guide offers a thorough and practical overview of ten key topics related to incubation and acceleration, as understood by some of the most experienced and knowledgeable support organisations on the planet.
A report on the impact of incubators and accelerators on start-up businesses and on the wider business ecosystem.
Why is high-growth entrepreneurship scarce in developing countries? Does this scarcity reflect firm capabilities constraints? This paper explores these questions using as a laboratory an accelerator in Colombia that selects participants using scores from randomly assigned judges and offers them training, advice, and visibility but no cash. Exploiting exogenous differences in judges’ scoring generosity, the paper shows that alleviating constraints to firm capabilities unlocks innovative entrepreneurs’ potential but does not transform subpar ideas into high-growth firms.
This framework is intended to assist key stakeholders of BtB, senior leadership, programme teams and delivery bodies to understand the approach BtB takes towards evaluation and what standards are expected in the form of robust evaluations to inform future decision making. Robust evaluation helps key stakeholders understand impact, informs spending reviews and fiscal events. Programmes vary in nature and as a result this framework does not set out one particular way of conducting evaluation.

Practitioners and academic researchers studying business accelerators have produced a substantial number of studies on accelerators. The online scholastic archive Social Science Research Network (SSRN), for instance, lists almost 800 entries on the topic since 2005, with over two-thirds of the posts dated 2018 or later.

Despite the importance of innovation and high-growth entrepreneurship for economic growth, there are still many open questions on the best approaches to support them. This policy brief looks at the need to experiment with new approaches to innovation policy and, crucially, learn what works.
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