| dc.description.abstract | The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalisation globally, leaving no exceptions for business accelerators. Accelerators are organisations that provide knowledge and other critical resources needed for the high growth of a startup. A gap in research lies in understanding how the current accelerators' practices affect the startup founders' performance and their outcomes and, eventually, if this performance could be increased by optimising parts of the services facilitated by the accelerator. This thesis explores the startup founders’ experiences of the services provided by Moment and identifies challenges related to knowledge sharing that would inhibit the digitalisation of the services. As Moment is a distinct type of accelerator, a single case study seemed as viable. Semi-structured interviews with four out of eighteen startup companies in the portfolio have been conducted. The literature review is based on accelerators, different types of knowledge and sharing of that knowledge, and digitalisation of knowledge work. Analysis of the results indicates that a trade-off appears between the social connection and scalability due to possible digitalisation.
On the one hand, the performance of Moment could be enhanced as the digitalisation of services and implementation of digital tools would allow for scalability and cost-efficiency of the acceleration program. Digitalisation would also positively affect entrepreneurial learning due to the better overview of the knowledge resources that Moment proposes, more structured training and more freed-up time, which could be used for complex problem-solving. On the other hand, the performance of founders could be affected negatively due to the growing distance between them and accelerator managers. Remote work would make cultivating trust, social connection, motivation, and getting supervision right on time challenging due to more extensive time constraints needed to coordinate the meetings. The complexity of knowledge and technology could negatively affect engagement, motivation and productivity due to information overload. On top of that, a lack of technological risk knowledge would make it even more challenging to cultivate trust, which is crucial for effective knowledge sharing. The results indicate that transition to a partly virtual setting should be carefully considered. However, further research is needed to draw generalisable conclusions, as the sample size in this study is very small. | |