Transnational Acceleration of Local Startups: Portugal's Building Global Innovators (BGI) Model

This chapter explores the tenets and the practice of a transnational initiative to promote local entrepreneurial growth: the Building Global Innovators (BGI) model, a startup accelerator based in Lisbon (Portugal) and in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA). We examine the pathways through which BGI's process and global network of experts helped two successful Portuguese technology startups grow and scale very quickly – Movvo and Veniam. We combine literatures from strategic management, marketing and economic geography to explore BGI's transnational acceleration model, which taps into global “pipelines” and distant entrepreneurial ecosystems, namely as a way to access the expertise, market opportunities and venture capital that is often unavailable in emergent and policy-sheltered local clusters. We discuss the relevance of such a transnational acceleration model for high-tech startups in peripheral economies.