Essays on Business Acceleration and Entrepreneurship

In many industries, the innovation dynamics are gradually changing. Innovative activity is increasingly linked to small, entrepreneurial ventures located in high-tech regional clusters and less associated with large multinational corporations that have been driving research and development in the past. These growth-oriented business ventures and the individuals engaged in entrepreneurial activity constitute the focus of this dissertation. The first essay investigates the phenomenon of accelerator programs, which are designed to offer support to young ventures in turning their business idea into a successful and scalable business model and provide them with fast-test validation. The theorized benefits are put to an empirical test to explore how accelerators help young firms create superior value and thereby advance the debate on the effectiveness of these initiatives. The second essay examines whether the fall of Nokia and the associated downsizing of a sizeable fraction of a nation’s workforce constituted a trigger for increased entrepreneurial activity in Finland. From a policy perspective, the evaluation of corporate and public efforts to minimize the negative impact of the massive turmoil represents an interesting avenue of research. Finally, the third essay which is currently in develop-ment focuses on analyzing the differential effect of a high school entrepreneurship education program on students with diverse social backgrounds. The study aims to bring a new dynamic to the current debate of the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education by investigating how entrepreneurial predispositions influence the formation of entrepreneurial intentions.