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This study aims to explore gender performance in entrepreneurial pitching. Understanding pitching as a social practice, the authors argue that pitch content and body gestures contain gender-based norms and practices. The authors focus on early-stage ventures and the hegemonic masculinities and femininities that are performed in entrepreneurial pitches. The main research question is as follows: How is gender performed in entrepreneurial pitching?

The authors carried out the study with the post-structuralist feminist approach. The authors collected and analyzed nine online pitches with the reflexive thematic method to depict hegemonic masculinities and femininities performed at the pitch.

The authors found that heroic and breadwinner masculinities are dominant in pitching. Both male and female founders perform hegemonic masculinities. Entrepreneurs are expected to be assertive but empathetic people. Finally, there are connections between what entrepreneurs do and what investors ask, indicating the iteration of gender performance and expectations.

While the online setting helps the authors to collect data during the pandemic, it limits the observation of the place, space and interactions between the judges/investors and the entrepreneurs. As a result, the linguistic and gesture communication of the investors in the pitch was not discussed in full-length in this paper. Also, as the authors observed, people would come to the pitch knowing what they should perform and how they should interact. Therefore, the preparation of the pitch as a study context could provide rich details on how gender norms and stereotypes influence people's interactions and their entrepreneurial identity. Lastly, the study has a methodological limitation. The authors did not include aspects of space in the analysis. It is mainly due to the variety of settings that the pitching sessions that the data set had.

For social practices and policies, the results indicate barriers to finance for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are rewarded when they perform entrepreneurial hegemonic masculinities with a touch of emphasized femininities. Eventually, if women entrepreneurs do not perform correctly as investors expect them to, they will face barriers to acquiring finance. It is important to acknowledge how certain gendered biases might be (re)constructed and (re)produced through entrepreneurial activities, in which pitching is one of them.

Practitioners could utilize research findings to understand how gender stereotypes exist not only on the pitch stage but also before and after the pitch, such as the choice of business idea and pitch training. In other words, it is necessary to create a more enabling environment for women entrepreneurs, such as customizing the accelerator program so that all business ideas receive relevant support from experts. On a macro level, the study has shown that seemingly gender-equal societies do not practically translate into higher participation of women in entrepreneurship.

For theoretical contributions, the study enhances the discussion that entrepreneurship is gendered; women and men entrepreneurs need to perform certain hegemonic traits to be legitimated as founders. The authors also address various pitching practices that shape pitch performance by including both textual and semiotic data in the study. This study provides social implications on the awareness of gendered norms and the design of entrepreneurial pitching.

We argue that voice – the sound that people produce when they speak – is an important resource for entrepreneurs, especially when they are pitching to potential investors. We integrate evidence from entrepreneurship, social psychology and linguistics to show that the voice can be regarded both as a tool for entrepreneurs to utilize and as a vital source of information allowing listeners to make judgements about the speaker and their message. To better understand how the voice may be used and interpreted in investment pitches, we develop a model of the relationship between the entrepreneurial voice and investor judgments. Voice depends on entrepreneurs’ characteristics including gender and communication goals but can be utilized to express emotions (purposefully or not) and signal qualities such as competence and trustworthiness. How potential investors interpret these displays depends on cultural expectations and stereotypes. Our review illustrates that female entrepreneurs may find it more difficult to persuade investors due to their naturally higher voice pitch and bias against speech patterns prevalent among young women. We highlight directions for future research exploring the voice as a unique cultural resource for entrepreneurs.

This paper aims to identify the factors that influence the evaluation of an idea beyond its intrinsic values, especially those that relate to the presentation of the idea. With reference to a review of research conducted in the fields of psycho-sociology and psychology and using a qualitative comparative approach, the analysis of 57 pitches of entrepreneurial ideas during two start-up weekends shows that ideas receive the highest evaluation when they are judged to be the best in terms of novelty, feasibility, and relevance. However, our results also show that mastery by ideators of the basics of pitch presentation – especially clear enunciation – is also a necessary condition for acceptance of the idea by the audience. The paper seeks to contribute to the literature by identifying the most favorable configurations for a positive evaluation of an entrepreneurial idea in this type of innovation contest.

This paper investigates how early-stage founders use the 60-s nascent pitch to attract co-founders, by applying the narrative paradigm.

Videos of supported and non-supported pitches from Startup Weekend were analysed using the Grounded Theory Method.

The findings were used to develop a framework for a successful nascent pitch. It shows that founders who can engage the audience, convey credibility and use symbols effectively are more likely to attract co-founders. Bringing these three elements together through personalisation, that is, making the startup concept tangible and personally relevant for co-founders to visualise, enables the founder to talk a venture into existence.

This paper holds implications for founders and entrepreneurship mentors to craft a powerful, persuasive pitch by drawing on the framework.

The framework brings a holistic understanding to the nascent pitch and explains how nascent founders acquire human resources at one of the earliest stages of venture formation. In this way, concerns of prior fragmented approaches focussed only on narrative elements of investment pitches are addressed.

This volume brings together empirical and conceptual papers that investigate the challenges of organizing creativity in the innovation journey in and across different empirical contexts. Seen as the basis for innovating new products, processes or services, organizing creativity is studied as intentional efforts that occur in teams, organizations, and fields. What creativity is, how it is defined, negotiated and recognized is hereby co-constructed with different audiences and in different economic and societal spheres. The papers in this volume extend our understanding of these contextualized social dynamics of organizing creativity in four directions. The first direction sheds light on the temporal dynamics of organizing creativity in artistic fields. The second direction compares creative processes in arts and science, thereby examining tensions and uncertainties in the creative process unfolding in two distinctive contexts of creativity. The third direction examines identity struggles of creative agents in organizations with clashing roles, professional norms, and ambiguities in creativity assessment. The fourth and final direction unravels the communicative journey of ideas from pitching to feedback, revealing how ideas are challenged, enriched, and acquire meaning in communicative interaction. Overall, the papers in this volume contribute to a situated view of creative processes in innovation which goes beyond questions of idea generation to account for dynamics of idea development, judgment, and dissemination which involve identity struggles, evaluation, and communication – processes which are at the heart of organizing for innovation.

This article of exploratory research provides a critical perspective on accountability, focusing on three characteristics: transparency, asymmetry and individual agency. An experimental method is developed, calling for an ethics of accountability.

Four entrepreneurs have given accounts of themselves and their projects in life cycle interviews. This article applies Devereux's approach (1967), which allows for opacity (the “unconscious”) to oneself and to others with symmetry between analysts and analysed, and a lack of demarcation between the observer and the observed.

A tragic entrepreneurial accountability trap of continuous self-justification was discovered, which pertains both to the entrepreneurs and the researchers. Nonetheless, the researchers as inspired by Devereux's method were able to realize a form of accounterability.

This article shows that the demands for transparent, asymmetrical and agentive accountability call for ethical reflection. The request for accounts, as resulting in the accounts given and the research conducted into accountability, are all sources of constraints. Differing the accountability situation may lessen the constraints.

This study introduces Devereux's method as an investigative tool in accountability research, opening up new perspectives on communication and analysis. This article shows the researcher as situated both inside and outside of the accountability mechanisms. This article explores a singular form of accountability; that of entrepreneurs who seemingly only account for the future, thereby disconnecting them from others.

Despite the gains that have been made by adopting contemporary theories of practice in entrepreneurship studies, the field still lacks a comprehensive practice theory of entrepreneurial learning. In this article, we develop a practice theory of entrepreneurial learning by elaborating on the relations between practicing, knowing and learning.

Using a video ethnography of a two-day “Startup Weekend for Refugees” event in Amsterdam, our aim is to further theorise the relational, material and embodied nature of entrepreneurial learning through analysing video fragments of naturally occurring practices.

Our findings demonstrate that entrepreneurial learning transpires through, and is emergent from, practices and their relations. On the one hand, practitioners learn to competently participate in various practices by sensing, observing and experimenting with the meaning of others' gestures and utterances. On the other, the learning of new opportunities for value creation emerges as practitioners connect various practices to one another through translation.

This article contributes by illustrating and explaining real-time instances of learning to develop a practice theory of entrepreneurial learning. This contributes to the literature by detailing the relations between learning, knowing and practising entrepreneurship, which leads to a novel alternative to existing individual- and organisational-level learning theories.

As mastering the two-minute entrepreneurial pitch is a key skill required of entrepreneurs and all those who have to sell an idea in a business context, the purpose of this paper is to analyse successful entrepreneurial pitches in order to provide practical pitch-related advice to entrepreneurs and to business school instructors developing pedagogical materials.

As mastering the two-minute entrepreneurial pitch is a key skill required of entrepreneurs and all those who have to sell an idea in a business context, this paper aims to analyse successful entrepreneurial pitches in order to provide practical pitch-related advice to entrepreneurs and to business school instructors developing pedagogical materials.

A ten-stage discourse framework was shown to underlie most pitches and typical linguistic exponents and rhetorical devices were identified. While there was a strong correlation between linguistic exponents and particular organisational stages, it was not possible to map the rhetorical strategies or tropes onto the organisational stages. The rhetorical framework provides a macro-structure to help entrepreneurs manipulate key content, whereas the linguistic framework highlights the salient grammatical, organisational, syntactic and lexical features of a successful pitch.

The sample of entrepreneurial pitches analysed is too small to be totally representative of the entrepreneurial pitch in general. However, this in-depth multi-dimensional analysis provides initial research into the canonical features of the entrepreneurial pitch.

This study provides an actionable, best practice, discoursal template for the entrepreneurial pitch together with the typical linguistic exponents and rhetorical features. The findings should sensitise entrepreneurs and instructors to salient macro- and micro-features of the entrepreneurial pitch.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that has been carried out that takes a multi-dimensional analysis approach (both rhetorical and linguistic/discourse analysis) to deconstruct the entrepreneurial pitch.

This paper investigates gender disparity in investment decisions within the popular American TV show Shark Tank.

The research uses a comprehensive dataset of 925 pitches from 14 seasons and 316 episodes, covering August 2009 to May 2023.

Contrary to previous studies, the findings indicate that female entrepreneurs do n'ot face discrimination in terms of their pitching success rates, regardless of their industry affiliation. However, the authors did observe that female entrepreneurs tend to receive lower valuations, both self-assessed and in final deals. This suggests a self-imposed gender gap in venture capital and angel investing, likely stemming from lower entrepreneurial aspirations among women.

To tackle this issue, the authors propose promoting female venture capital by increasing the representation of female entrepreneurs and business angels on Shark Tank. Such role models can inspire aspiring women in these fields. Additionally, the authors believe that mixed-gender founder teams, comprising both men and women, can play a significant role in developing promising startups with viable business models.

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed angel investment meetings from in-person to online. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether this move affected angel investors' perception of subjective behavioral cues in pitch sessions within a large Brazilian angel group.

This study followed an exploratory approach using a triangulation process that combined observation, documents and interviews. Data collected by observation, document studies, and interviews were themed, coded, and organized during the research.

The move from in-person to online pitches did not seem to affect levels of trustworthiness or arrogance as angels assessed more message content during Q&A sessions. Body movement, gestures and “eye gaze” (i.e. the look on a presenter’s face) played a central role in passion assessment during in-person meetings. Body language was highly limited during online sessions and tone of voice became the main source of passion assessment.

The findings of this study suggest that pitches at online meetings affect angel investors' perception of founders' subjective cues, particularly cues pertaining to passion. Entrepreneurs should be trained to convey passion with tone of voice and to improve their body language in the context of webcam use. The interviews with volunteer sampling were subject to volunteer bias. Additionally, the findings may be affected by cultural context.

A practical contribution of this study is to highlight the need for entrepreneurs to be trained for online pitches. In an online setting, body language is limited, but it is still possible to use one’s hands and tone of voice to connect better to investors.

This study is unique because it captures the transition of angel investment meetings from in-person affairs before the pandemic to online meetings during the pandemic crisis. These unique circumstances provided a real-world laboratory to observe founders' subjective cue effects on angel investment decision-making.