Mentors’ Motives and Mentoring Functions Associated with Mentoring of Social and Commercial New Ventures

Although mentoring services have been advanced as an important mechanism of incubator and accelerator programs for overcoming the resource constraints of commercial and social new ventures, it has traditionally focused on the entrepreneur's perspective and neglected the mentor's perspective, particularly the examination of mentors' motivations and behavior. The present study employed a qualitative research strategy for examining mentoring from the perspective of the mentor. A total of 18 mentors from accelerator and incubator programs located in Belgium participated in in-depth interviews regarding their experience as a mentor. Given the distinctive and similar dimensions of social and commercial new ventures, this study reveals a more comprehensive view of various mentor motives related to the provision of functions, identifying similarities and distinctions between both types of new ventures mentoring motivations and functional differences of these types of motivation. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are presented.