Identifing the role of mentors in creating new businesses in accelerator

Entrepreneurs face a variety of challenges launching their business. In this regard, mentoring is an effective approach to improve entrepreneurs’ learning. Yet, there is little research on the role of mentor in starting a new business by a novice entrepreneur. Therefore, this research aimed to identify the role of a mentor in starting-up a new business by novice entrepreneur in accelerators. In this research, qualitative method and semi-structured interviews were employed to identify various aspects of mentor roles (cognitive, affective and managerial). Purposeful and snowball sampling methods were used for the selection of the mentors. Sampling and interviews were continued until theoretical saturation. Although, in the 14th interview, theoretical saturation was achieved, to insure the credibility of the findings the interviews continued to the 17th sample. Analysis of the data and integration of the categories and components of mentor’s roles reveled that they played two distinctive roles including: indirect and direct. Totally, 38 categories were identified that were classified into 4 dimensions of Jane and Audit’s (2012) framework (cognitive, affective managerial). Furthermore, two dimensions of learning and new technologies emerged from this study and were added to the framework employed in this study.