Affiliation:
1. AGH University of Krakow, Faculty of Management, Krakow, Poland
Abstract
An entrepreneurial pitch is a brief description of the value proposition of a company; it is a way to draw the attention of potential investors. Their decisions are based on the informational contents of pitches but also on non-rational factors like cognitive biases, rhetorical devices, and presentation tools that are designed to influence the listeners. This paper reviews the literature on the non-rational factors of investors' decisions and especially on the role of narrative structures; in particular, the use of characters and points of view. Using characters and points of view as tools for building the engagement of entrepreneurial pitch listeners is widely suggested in popular how-to literature; however, there is a gap in the scholarly research. In this paper, a character taxonomy is proposed and verified using a corpus of short entrepreneurial pitches. Also, specific ways of using characters and structuring pitches narratively are derived from the analysed pitch corpus. On this basis, a series of experiments are proposed in order to empirically explore the effectiveness of the different narrative structures of entrepreneurial pitches.
Publisher
Towarzystwo Naukowe Organizacji i Kierownictwa
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