“Let’s have a chat!”: a field study on relational governance in the evolution of new venture-accelerator relationships

Cooperative behavior can facilitate successful relationships between new ventures and investors after investment but also during partner selection. This view may apply especially to accelerators, which differ from other investors by investments at the earliest venture-development stages, significant collaboration between new ventures and investors, and fast decision-making. However, prior research is insufficient to describe the role of relational governance between new ventures and accelerators. We conduct ethnographic research and twenty interviews to determine how relational governance is built into and influences how the new venture-accelerator relationship emerges. Our findings reveal that process-based trust and relational norms are developed earlier in this relationship than research from other investment contexts suggests. We derive a framework that indicates that actors include in their partner-selection processes elements that allow them to build these relational governance mechanisms, such as interacting (e.g., having a chat) and aligning future behavior, early on. We theorize that they do so because they cannot rely on ventures’ track records and seek partners with whom transactions can be defined in the short term and with whom significant collaboration is possible. Our work contributes to relational governance theory in new venture-investor relationships and recent efforts to understand accelerators.