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In conventional accelerators, start-ups seek venture capital to scale their business, but that doesn’t work for every type of business. For social enterprises, community connections can be more valuable than money.

Desautels’ Assistant Professor Anna Kim studied how social enterprises fared at two accelerators in Detroit, and found they were better served by an alternative model that afforded time to deepen community connections. By the end of Kim’s research, nearly all companies in the traditional accelerator had left the city, and most had failed. But many of the start-ups in the alternative accelerator were still going strong.

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