Start-up factories,transnational entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ecosystems: unpacking the lure of start-up accelerator programmes

This paper examines the role of accelerator programmes in promoting transnational entrepreneurship. Designed to assist the growth of start-ups by providing seed finance and structured entrepreneurship support, these programmes are now a prominent feature in many entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. Drawing on in-depth qualitative evidence focused on one particular programme, the paper shows accelerators play an important intermediary or ‘brokerage mechanism’ providing start-ups with enhanced relational connections and networks. Transnational entrepreneurs attracted to these programmes are highly focused on exploiting these networks whilst maintaining multiple levels of embeddedness in various contexts to maximize the opportunities afforded by accelerators. While many governments are attempting to replicate accelerators programmes within the public sector, the paper concludes that such attempts may prove problematic within weaker entrepreneurial ecosystems.     

America as a European power: the end of empire by integration?

Is the postwar partnership between Europe and America now a historical artefact? Much depends on whether the notion of America as a ‘European power’ still holds. The US attained this status through a strategy of ‘empire by integration’, extending its postwar ‘empire’ through negotiation and support for European integration, and envisaging a collectively powerful Europe as fundamental to the health of its most important security alliance. The election of George W. Bush, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the war in Iraq are often seen as producing deep ruptures both in American policy towards Europe and the transatlantic alliance. Yet, the embrace of a new US policy of ‘disaggregation’ of Europe is unproven, and in any event unlikely to mark a permanent shift. The US and Europe are surprisingly close to agreement on ends for the international order. Conflict over Iraq has obscured a significant increase in policy cooperation and convergence of strategy in the war on terrorism.     

Policy Change: An Advocacy Coalition Framework Perspective

One purpose of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is to explain policy change. Previous holistic reviews of the ACF by Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen (2009) and Pierce, Peterson, Jones, Garrard, and Vu (2017) of the framework have not explicitly analyzed all the concepts and their interactions in a systematic manner. To address this gap and inform scholars and practitioners about past findings, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for future research, this article analyzes how the ACF's theory of policy change is applied to 148 policy processes among 67 journal articles from 2007 to 2014. Similar to Weible et al. (2009), this research finds the frequent use of multiple primary pathways to policy change, infrequent use of many of the ACF's concepts, a plurality of applications in the environment and energy domain, comparison of subsystems, and a need for greater clarity and transparency among applications. Unlike Weible et al. (2009), this article explores associations between primary pathways and policy domains, the frequency of associations between primary pathways and secondary components, policy change and stasis, and identifies threats to internal validity of key ACF concepts.