Who is a New Venture Mentor? A Clarification of the Concept and Implications for Research

New venture mentoring is paramount to startup acceleration and growth. In the past five years we observed a proliferation of scholarly interest in the concept, making it a promising theoretical lens through which scholars can better understand entrepreneurship. To summarize the recent progress of this stream and promote its use, we systematically review 71 articles in leading management and entrepreneurship journals published over three decades. We describe how mentoring has been adopted in the entrepreneurship research and what the implications and future directions for the scholarship are. In addition, we provide an in-depth review of multiple and diverging new venture mentoring definitions offered by existing studies and discuss the implications of these definitions. The discussion is enriched by the delineation of the core attributes of new venture mentoring relationships, distinguishing them from other types of developmental relations. We conclude with the recommendations for future new venture mentoring research."