Previously, it was mentioned that university accelerators and incubators vary dramatically. They do not have standardized format and are influenced by a significant number of factors, including their linkage to universities, their networking, the liaisons with corporate segment and experts, funding sources. Thus, comparative analysis of several programs is irrelevant and does not correspond with research aim and goals. However, in the master thesis several programs are closer observed in order to get the insights on:goal-setting and resource allocation.

To begin with, AUTM (previously known as Association of University Technology Managers) is the first organization to be observed. It is not an acceleration program, linked to one particular university. AUTM performs like the non-profit organization, joining efforts to educate, promote and inspire professionals to support the development of academic research that changes the world and drives innovation forward. Its community comprised of more than 3,000 members from more than 800 universities, research centers, hospitals, businesses and state organizations around the world. For the master thesis this organization should be included for several reasons. Firstly, such example allows to study whether it is possible to set and follow the goal on project development, when there is a huge number of tech transfer professional, united in one structure, with absolute different background, motivation, skills and levels of proficiencies. Secondly, it is important to see how the AUTM team manages to track their own movement towards their global goal as well as progress of their members. Do they have standardized formats, distributed offline? Or, alternatively, they may develop more personalized approach for their members due to their various areas and preparation levels? From the information on official website it seems that AUTM is responsible for progress of a significant number of projects like: researches, consulting services, volunteer projects, certification, educational programs, foundations, meaning that AUTM team should be universal professionals and have outstanding expertise in a number of fields to be able to follow all these initiatives.

Academic technology transfer in the USA (AUTM, 2018) since 1996 to 2015 has lead to support of 4.3 million jobs, to contribution of 1.3 trillion dollars to U.S. gross industrial output. In terms of contribution to start-ups through academic technology transfer it is important to highlight that 11 thousands of start-ups have been formed through this collaboration and 70% of university licenses were given to start-ups and small companies. Technology transfer professionals associated with universities and other academic institutions manage the complex process of generating ideas from the lab to the marketplace -- from evaluating and protecting discoveries to commercializing the inventions through new and existing companies.

AUTM performs as a connected community, where members share knowledge, experience, expertise and support. The first goal from AUTM mission is to empower membership through the constant exchange of knowledge, tools, connections, and training. With the focus on developing sustainable and favorable conditions for all community members, AUTM acts like an accelerator aimed at academic knowledge development, but with no linkage to particular academic program or research institution. The scope of AUTM work varies from corporate engagement to intellectual property protection for its members. AUTM provides its members with access to variety of searchable reports and data in a variety of formats: infographic, surveys, databases, toolkits (include AUTM position papers and articles on global health issues and on support of women in STEM and entrepreneurship), agreements (include Material Transfer Agreements and Model Inter-Institutional Agreements templates, which help to manage relationships with potential investors, partners and other institutions), Technology Transfer Practice Manual (chock-full of critical how-to information for beginners to seasoned tech transfer professionals). Due to the structure of Technology Transfer Practice Manual it seems that AUTM highlight four crucial aspects of running TTO: legal (includes laws and regulations), management (here AUTM separately distinguish management of student intellectual property issues at institutions of higher education), invention (includes disclosure, review and protection), special and complex issues (official website).

As far as notion of intellectual property (IP) constantly follows all academic researches as well as development of new products and technologies, AUTM pays special attention for increasing the levels of IP literacy levels of its members. Moreover, AUTM has targeted beyond its active members and manage student intellectual property issues at institutions of higher education, contributing to the general levels of IP levels in the academic world. Accordingly, university community members, including students, faculty, alumni, and administrators, should all have constant and free access to IP literacy. AUTM covers IP aspect both in terms of academic research and more business-oriented research. The team of AUTM states that inventions and developments, which may occur during students' work on entrepreneurship projects or in the various laboratories as part of a research experience or during industry-sponsored Capstone projects, are hardly do be managed by the students on their own. It happens due to the fact that undergraduates and masters students are not generally regarded as being employed by their university in the traditional sense. Accordingly, student-generated IP lies outside of the clear-cut employment context and raises a unique set of issues concerning ownership and other IP-related rights. In comparison, all faculty and graduate researchers have contractual relationship with an institution that are quite formalized and transparent. However, AUTM unites and provides expertise targeted at all possible groups but the way of the information and resource distribution vary slightly, depending on certain aims and situation of its members.

Among recent achievements of AUTM there is $16 million grant, awarded for a 5-year, to collaborate with the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) under the Enabling Federal Technology Transfer Program. The mission of current collaboration is to help the private sector and academia engage and collaborate with federal laboratories through technology transfer to support national security and economic prosperity. AUTM will use its decades of experience providing outreach, professional education and meetings to support the FLC in fulfilling its Congressionally mandated mission to promote, educate, and facilitate the transfer of technologies from the federal laboratories.

Three other acceleration initiatives have a strong linkage to a particular university.Such samples provide better understanding, how a university and its accelerator are interconnected, to find out what are commitments of an accelerator team and participants to a university. In addition, the question of resource distribution channels is covered in the master thesis as well. All the selected programs are located in Russia. However, they vary in their target audiences, aims, brand positioning, areas of projects, resources allocated. One of them, Phystech Accelerator if fully target at the USA market, which affects its goals, processes and selected project for further development. The general trend demonstrates that incubators and accelerators, linked to Russian universities, have developed business models that differ from those of their international peers in important ways (Russian National Benchmark 16/17). Russian programs tend to rely less on university funding than their global and European peers. Instead, they focus to a larger degree on service fees and event revenue as sources of income. Among the selected programs for closer analysis, there are the following: the HSE Business Incubator, Phystech Start and Phystech Start.

The HSE Business Incubator is a structural unit of HSE University and the first university-linked business incubator in Russia. Since 2006, the unit has been engaged in the generation and development of startups and contributed to the development of innovative infrastructure for the Russian government. Over the past 3 years alone, more than 800 teams have completed business incubator programs, and graduates have attracted more than a billion rubles in investments. The incubator's focus varies significantly and covers following areas of startups' specializations: educational technology, marketing and advertising, retail, industrial robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, financial technologies, information security, e-commerce, voice recognition and synthesis, augmented and virtual reality, and other industries (National Research University Higher School of Economics). The best cases of graduates' projects include TimePad, an event planning service; Kodabra, a programming school; GoLama, a grocery delivery service; Simple Good (originally - “Prostoe Dobro”), a charity water service; Store&Cash, a warehouse and trade accounting service.

In November 2019 the HSE Business Incubator took 1st place in the 2019-2020 UBI Global World Ranking of University-Linked Business Accelerators (UBI Global AG). The ranking rates the effectiveness of each university incubator in terms of 40 factors, which are grouped into three main categories: the impact on the ecosystem; the value for client startups; and the attractiveness of the incubation program. In all three of these categories, the HSE Business Incubator performed higher than the average for all participating institutions. The HSE Business Incubator performed best in such areas as talent retention, graduate performance and economic impact, and, particularly, the number of jobs created in alumni startups. The HSE Business Incubator took the leading position among 364 programs from 78 countries were included in the ranking. The HSE Business Incubator is well-known for introducing new startup development techniques.

In addition, the HSE Business Incubator holds a number of contests for student business projects. One of the student business project competition is called the HSE{Business}Cup and usually is organized with the support of the corporate segment.The competition's objective is to foster the development of the innovative and entrepreneurial projects university students have created. The participants of the final stages receive a certain sums of money for piloting stage - to implement the projects to reality and test their viability. The teams can also receive additional business grant from a supporting partner of corporate business segment. The teams participating in the competition can spend their winnings on prototyping, testing business hypotheses and channels, developing a business plan, and selecting a business model (official website of HSE).

The HSE Business Incubator holds a regular 3-day intensive immersion format for the community, aimed at the support and development of entrepreneurship. The purposes of the series of the Global Incubation Conferences, imitated by HSE Incubator, are the following:

- exchange of the expertise

- networking with the best representatives of the community

- analyzing key trends of the fast-growing and always developing environment
- case studies, which unites both beginners and those, who have been working with innovative companies for a long time.

Moving to analysis of Phystech Start,it is important to mention that it lies in the ecosystem of Startech.vc, which goes far beyond the acceleration for projects. The ecosystem targeted at the development of technological entrepreneurship and has the venture capital. Startech.vc consist of the following projects, which vary in aims, resources and target audiences. Moreover, the levels of connection between the open innovation formats and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) also differ. One of them require closer connection and integration than others. The ecosystem includes representative office of the international network of acceleration and corporate programs Startupbootcamp Russia. Global Pilots initiative, led by - Microsoft, Ernst & Young, Startupbootcamp with Altergate support for Russian technology start-ups to launch the product on the global market and prepare for pilot projects with international clients. Among other formats that lie in the innovation environment of MIPT there are accelerator in China, corporate pilot programs, during which the team evaluates and implements individual projects of different complexity, corporate or industrial acceleration programs aimed at introducing innovations in a large organization for strategic development. For the for an audience with wider interests a series of industry events is conducted on the regular basis, including the following: business breakfasts, networking meetings and open lectures of guest experts. Educational aspect is also key direction of Startech.vc and online-courses on technological entrepreneurship are provided by the team for all comers. Two more applied formats are ENGINEER 4.0, the technology entrepreneurship workshop program for students, young professionals and scientists, and Social Tech Challenge 2020, the contest of technological projects for the new labor market. The format that strongly matches with key research aim of the master thesis is Phystech Start. The programis targeted directly at technologica; entrepreneurs to develop them and to provide them with a number of useful resources, so the participants can show excellent results after acceleration: attract investments, launch pilot projects with corporations, actively develop sales and enter the international market. It seems that all the initiatives that are developed in the ecosystem of MIPT are precisely targeted at technological entrepreneurs and engineers in general, matching with the focus of the university. Currently fifth online set is going on and more than 52 projects have graduated from the program and 95 have passed educational part of the program. The projects, participated in Phystech Start, have brought more than 217 million rubles in investments. The program's target audience are teams of technological start-ups, which consist at least of two professionals: developer/engineer and sales manager. The other important condition to participate is a stage of a project - only projects with minimally viable product (MVP) is allowed to apply for. MVP demonstrates that the product or service can be put on the market now. Priority is given to startups with first sales. One program set lasts 3 months and includes several phases: educational program, weekly tracker consultations, mentor meetings, report meetings on achieving objectives (tracking) and demo day (graduation day) with a presentation with participation of guest investors, funds and corporations.

Observing the next program Phystech Accelerator, it should be highlighted that the program belongs to MIPT as well as PhystechStart, however, it does not belong to Startech.vc infrastructure. And it acts like an independent initiative with specific goals and projects selected. Initially first set of Phystech Accelerator “I track” was hold in collaboration with Data Monsters and the initial aim was to provide the necessary support to projects to be launched in the American market. Recently Phystech Accelerator changes its target and mission. Since the beginning of 2020 year the accelerator team have been working on attracting foreign R&D orders for being implemented by MIPT. We focused on bioinformatics and three relevant laboratories of MIPT. The big idea, followed by this direction of Phystech Accelerator, is the strong believe that work on foreign R&D orders give a global outlook and ignite the ambitions of students and professors at MIPT. If the selected direction demonstrates its success, when the accelerator team will try to expand this practice to other laboratories and industries. The scope of projects and their scenarios for development is defined by the organizers quite precisely and include the following: experts help and useful connections in the pharmacological industry and biotechnology; introduction and joint projects with foreign pharmaceutical companies; overseas contract with research organizations.

After collecting the basis data on the programs, covered in the master thesis, the key aspects are systematized to provide the complex view on the samples (table 4).

Table 4: Key Aspects of Four Selected University Accelerators

Source: official websites of the university accelerators

Through closer view on selected acceleration programs it seems that AUTM and Phystech Start perceive the notion of participants' development in a wider scope, which includes acceleration as one of the parts of possible of research and entrepreneurial development of its participants. From their projects it becomes obvious that it impossible to pass just one acceleration program to boost a project or carry out a significant research. In order to develop ones idea or project, the participant should immerse in the environment of open innovation. Following such approach creates synergetic effect, resulting in project's acceleration and growth to the next level as well. As for the HSE incubator it defines its goal in more business oriented way and targets at entrepreneurs solely. Thus, the acceleration program of the HSE Incis perceived as a separate structure of the Higher School of Economics. However, it is enriched by the access to the university resources, including both tangible and intangible ones: offices, laboratories, experts, knowledge, researches and networking. Phystech Accelerator has the most distinctive approach in comparison with other two programs, carried in Russia. It seems that all its goals, projects, educational and tracking processes are driven by the mission to launch at the USA market. Even when the program sets were targeted on partnership with local corporations, the final goal remained the same - to launch or to sell the project to the USA. The mindset correlates even with operational processes of the program, being taken from the best American practices. Afterwards Phystech Start focuses on attracting foreign investments to their R&D laboratories. Such change demonstrates that the formats of open innovations at a university remain flexible and are interconnected. One format may be replaced with other, using previously accumulated knowledge, contacts and resources.
Knowledge, accumulated on these four acceleration programs, allows to digestfurther in exploring goal-setting for the acceleration and resources distribution and usage from both parties: organizers of a program and its start-ups participants through a series of expert interviews. It is essential to be on the same page with experts, understand the requirement, their official positioning of the program, which is communicated through all stakeholders, including possible participants, alumni, external experts, corporations, interested in building partnership, potential sponsors, investors, the academic community and the state.

2.2. Expert View on University Accelerators from the Point of Management and Participants

To better understand the possibilities of acceleration programs, run by universities, the master thesis includes ten interviews with experts, who are deeply involved in the sphere of university accelerators. Five of them are either the heads of programs or coordinators. Thus it is crucial to discuss with them and receive their expert opinion on following aspects: what is the main criteria for selection (this may significantly varies from what is stated on the official website of the program), to identify possible ways of how the progress within the program could be measured and which sides should be engaged at the process of assessment, how resources are distributed through all the participants and how the process of goal setting take place. Another five experts are participant of several accelerators, led by universities. For this part of interviews following aspects are covered: which factors are important while choosing an acceleration program to apply for, how they manage to take the resources, distributed through participants, and what they do to maximize them, how they track their progress and how goal setting occurs both inside their team and inside the accelerator. Hence, all the experts have relevant expertize and can bring their insight on these aspects that are key linked to the aim of the master thesis. The aim of the interviews is to cover the goals of accelerator team members and of start-ups and how they meet these goals during acceleration. Moreover, term paper tend to provide understanding of possible obstacles and triggers for reaching the goals.

As for heads of acceleration programs, the key criteria for experts for semi-structured interviews is the highly involvement in managerial processes of university accelerators. As for start-ups representatives, the key criteria is recent participation in acceleration program, because all programs transform dramatically and participants from old flows can provide the insights, which are irrelevant to the current state of the program. The other factor, which is also is taken into account, is the level of involvement of expert in the program. It turns out that some team members in some project take part unequally. The possible approach in order to overcome feedback from experts with the lack of engagement to the program is try to reach CEOs of start-ups or co-founders, because they demonstrate the highest levels of involvement to the program in most cases.

The experts are selected, basing on their accessibility, because the field is rather niche. In addition. The interviews are carried by using several applications like Zoom, Skype, Facebook Messenger in a format of online video calls. Two formats of interview questionnaires are developed: one for accelerator heads, other - for participants. However, the majority of questions are interconnected in order to demonstrate the opinion of both sides on the same aspects of accelerator.

The interview questionnaire for all experts from the side of accelerator teams includes the following questions:

1. What is the target audience of the accelerator?

2. How the selection process is organized? Which are the main criteria to pass?

3. What is more important for the accelerator, while selecting participants: mature and developed solution or matching with the overall vector of the accelerator?

4. Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

5. What is the mission of the accelerator?

6. The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for participants?

7. How do you track the progress of participants?

8. What is the general difference between corporate acceleration program and one at the university? What is the distinctive feature of your accelerator?

And the following question are included in questionnaire for experts from the side of start-up, participated in acceleration programs:

1. Why did your team decide to apply for this acceleration program? What alternatives did you observed?

2. Which was your aim for the acceleration? Did you manage to reach it through acceleration?

3. The acceleration provides a number of possibilities, including mentoring, resources, experts, networking. Which of them was the most valuable for your team?

4. How was the process of progress tracking organized during the acceleration?

5. Which dos and don'ts for a participant of an accelerator could you mention, based on personal experience and observations?

6. Could you name the distinctive feature of the accelerator - what makes it special among other acceleration programs?

In order to integrate the insights received from two expert groups during interviews, I provide separate tables for each group with observations and conclusions on university acceleration. To begin with, for the first expert group of accelerator representatives I define as crucial aspects the following: selection criteria, program focus,goal setting, progress tracking, resource distribution and program's value. According to interviews with all five experts, there are following insights received (tables5, 6).