Proposing a Supportive Framework for Creation of Social Startups in Accelerators

By the advent of support mechanisms and due to their significant role in augmenting the failure rate of startups, today we are witnessing the exponential growth of startup accelerators around the Globe. But, unfortunately, the main approach of these accelerators is focused on economical and not social ideas. While a great number of social startups are able to solve fundamental problems and have high social impacts. In the one hand, there is not an integrated support framework for a typical social accelerator, and generally these entities render selective services. Thus, this research is conducted in order to propose a support framework for social accelerators according to different stages, and therefore seven social accelerators from different locations around the world are selected and studied. This research, which is a multiple case study, is an applied qualitative research- narrative research. The results revealed that visiting social businesses, and introducing social entrepreneurs at the “entry stage”, introduction to social problems, initial market building, legitimacy, and confidence building at the “pre acceleration and acceleration stages”, and legitimizing, absorbing the stakeholders, as well as obtaining the necessary permissions at the “exit stage” are of paramount importance, and are rarely emphasized in the extant literature.