Venturing out: Designing effective pre-acceleration programs

Pre-acceleration programs are a recent addition to the entrepreneurship support system. These structured programs focus on aspiring entrepreneurs at the pre-venture stage. This paper investigates which educational design features and cohort compositions contribute to high entrepreneurial entry by examining the case of a preacceleration program with worldwide events, using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). We find two recipes for events with high venture creation and two recipes for events with low venture creation. Altogether, at this very early stage, gaining skills and tools, and having a diverse cohort, especially in what concerns gender diversity, appear to be more important than having feedback from mentors on nascent ideas and having many entrepreneurial talks. We discuss the implications of the different recipes for practitioners and researchers, and offer new research avenues.