Nea Tuovinen - 3rd year PhD presentation

Supervisors: Franziska Günzel-Jensen & Oana Vuculescu
Discussants: Susan Hilbolling & Signe Hedeboe Frederiksen

Title
Colouring In- and Outside the Lines – Facts and Fictions in Academic Entrepreneurs’ Temporal Narratives in Entrepreneurial Pitches 

Abstract
Entrepreneurial pitches are simultaneously acts of storytelling and acts of persuasion, requiring founders to blend factual grounds with fictive claims to mobilise resources from investors. In doing so, pitches become vehicles for future-making, through which entrepreneurs produce and enact the commercial futures of their ventures.

While prior research has identified rhetorical strategies for achieving narrative plausibility in commercial entrepreneurship, the distinctive pressures facing academic entrepreneurs remain underexplored. Situated between scientific integrity and entrepreneurial imagination, academic entrepreneurs must translate research projects into commercial ventures, making pitching a transformative practice through which the venture comes into being. Yet how academic entrepreneurs connect the factual research past with fictive commercial futures into a coherent venture's journey narrative remains poorly understood, despite pitching being a critical gateway into research commercialisation. Therefore, this paper examines how academic entrepreneurs blend facts and fictions in constructing their venture’s journey narratives in entrepreneurial pitches for resource mobilisation. 

This research question is investigated in the context of 23 early-stage academic venture cases participating in a European spinout programme, using a dataset of pitch recordings, slide decks and interviews. The inductive analysis of interview data identifies three framing factors, namely ghostly investor expectations, venture status and pitching as a game, that shape narrative choices in pitching. A subsequent Gioia analysis of the pitch narratives reveals three boundary-crossing temporal narrative mechanisms through which academic and commercial facts and fictions are interlinked across past, present and future: domain borrowing, contingency chaining and identity reframing. These mechanisms are deployed strategically to narrow the gap between the academic past and commercial futures in that entrepreneurs consciously borrow, chain and reframe facts and fictions from both domains to construct legitimacy, coherence and plausibility for a venture that is yet to materialise. 

The findings contribute to research on academic entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial storytelling and temporal narratives, with practical implications for academic entrepreneurs, pitch training programmes and university ecosystems that support the commercialisation of research-based innovation.

Everyone is welcome!