Complexidade causal na seleção de startups para programas públicos de aceleração: uma abordagem configuracional comparativa

Abstract

Faced with the growing interest in the global scenario due to the transformative potential of the relation of innovation and entrepreneurship, different initiatives appear to improve innovative ventures - among them, the startup accelerators. In this way, startup acceleration programs are a recent and rapidly growing phenomenon. Most accelerators in Brazil have developed their own methodology for selecting entrepreneurs and their startups to participate in their programs. However, little is known about this process - in particular, about the way in which expert evaluations result in different logical configurations that lead to the approval or disapproval of a startup in these selections. In this sense, this research, first, will seek to identify which are the characteristics that can highlight and differentiate a startup in the process of selecting an accelerator. Then, it will focus on searching for the condition settings that lead a startup to be (or not) selected for this kind of program. In view of these objectives, the Coincidence Analysis method (CNA) was chosen as a research approach, in order to understand the various combinations of conditions for the selection or not of the startups by an official public acceleration program in Brazil. So, the purpose of this research is to contribute to the field of strategy and innovation studies, signaling the main interactions between the factors that lead a startup to differentiate itself from the others in the perception of specialists evaluators in these ventures. Among the results, it is noteworthy that there was a standard about combining the factors "Team" and "Impact Potential" (EQP * IMP) as the most robust and able to explain the selection of startups in the three different years. Finally, regarding the factors sufficient to explain the non-selection, there was a greater diversity regarding the causal relevance of the factors, but there was still a great relevance of “eqp” and “imp”, since combined with the other factors, “tec ”or“ neg ”.