On Tuesday 21 January 2020 at 14:15 in room 2628-M323, Professor, PhD Ludovic Dibiaggio from SKEMA Business School, Nice, France will give a seminar presenting the following paper

Category Labels and Entrepreneurial Resource Acquisition: a Study of Crowdfunding Campaigns
by Jonathan Sitruk, University of Amsterdam; Ludovic Dibiaggio, SKEMA Business School, Diego Zunino, SKEMA Business School

Abstract
Resource acquisition is a crucial step in entrepreneurship. Audiences have a hard time evaluating early stage entrepreneurial projects because of their inherent ambiguity leading entrepreneurs to often resort to rhetorical strategies to help audiences make sense of them. From categorization literature, we identify category labels as a relevant technique entrepreneurs can use to help audiences make sense and reduce the ambiguity of their initiatives. Sometimes, entrepreneurs may refer to multiple labels to signal the recombination of the features of different categories. Depending on the semantic distance between categories, recombination is a double-edged sword for entrepreneurial projects because it highlights a tension between generating confusion and arising curiosity. We hypothesize that both the use of category labels as well as the degree of category spanning are associated with more resource acquisition. We also hypothesize an inverted U-shaped relationship between the curiosity of category label recombination and the level of resource acquisition. We find support for our hypotheses using the descriptions of 26,967 crowdfunding projects presented on Indiegogo and Kickstarter from 2010 to 2017.

Everyone is welcome!