Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the context of open innovation offered by accelerators can affect the successful growth of start-ups. The authors explore accelerators practices and tools in sustaining start-ups and increasing survival probability in their innovation process, with the aim of addressing the following research question: how can start-ups benefit from participation in an accelerator programme from an open innovation perspective?Design/methodology/approach: A review of the literature on start-up successes and failures and on major practices in the open innovation paradigm was carried out, delineating them in the context of accelerators. Given the absence of literature on accelerator practices for supporting start-ups, and aiming at a comprehensive understanding of how the open environment within the accelerator influences a start-up’s survival (or even success) by mitigating the probability of failure, the authors conducted an exploratory case study in an English accelerator.Findings: The open innovation practices mediated by an accelerator and the ones that are not covered, but that can benefit a start-up’s survival, are shown. On the one hand, main effective practices, such as dyadic co-creation with accelerator network partners and crowdsourcing, are revealed to address mostly the lack of, or wrong direction in, product, marketing and relative managerial abilities, which are not usually owned by a start-up due to its “newness”. On the other hand, some causes of failures, such as the intrinsic characteristics of founder teams, do not seem to be addressed by an open approach and neither does participation in an accelerator programme.Originality/value: This paper is the first to study and link the literature on accelerators, start-ups and open innovation.

Recently, concepts and principles from the Complexity Theory (or, generally speaking, the complexity sciences) have been applied as a perspective for capturing the influence of the context, interaction, and adaption in the innovation processes, such as the ones enabled in the business incubators. The purpose of this paper is to implement a frame of reference for understanding the start-ups’ incubator as a complex system where innovation, learning, and self-organization take place. We build on the interfaces between the Complexity Theory (i.e., complexity sciences) and Open Innovation literature to identify principles, patterns, and conditions that frame the incubation practices as simple rules aimed to sustain the innovation process towards the creation of new ventures. Results from the multiple case studies conducted in five incubators show that the features of variety, nonlinear interaction, interdependence, autonomy, and emergence of the incubation process framed as a complex system are enabled in different ways by the combination of the open innovation practices and services provided by the start-ups’ incubators, including the provision of physical infrastructure, access to funding streams, experts/entrepreneurs networking, education/workshops, mentorship, and advice.