Empirical Literature on the Business Pitch: Classes, Critiques and Future Trends

Abstract

The growing importance of entrepreneurship and innovation for economic growth has propitiated a discursive genre that nowadays is almost omnipresent, i.e., the pitch. As with other emerging genres used in professional settings (e.g., selling presentations, business plans, etc.), several instructional discourses regarding the pitch have come out in the form of manuals and courses offering training on "how to make a pitch more powerful". Empirical research, however, is less common. The aim of this paper is to qualitatively review and sort out the existing empirical research on the pitch. For this, three classifying categories are proposed according to its reception (mainly by investors), the focus on discursive features, and its evolution. Finally, some critiques to the empirical research on the pitch and a description of some future trends on the field are provided. This work may be useful for professionals interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, areas in which this emerging discourse broadly circulates.

Computer-assisted prosody training: Improving public speakers' vocal charisma with the Web-Pitcher

“…2-3 minutes long) pre-formulated product presentation or, more specifically, an investor pitch, cf. Sabaj et al (2020). The participants were instructed to familiarize themselves with this text so that they could perform the presentation fluently in their baseline speech a few days later.…”

“…There ar e different subtypes of such 'pitches', known as business pitch, elevator pitch, investor pitch, etc. (SABAJ et al, 2020).…”

Improving Students Argumentation Learning with Adaptive Self-Evaluation Nudging

“…However, no suitable corpus exists in literature that is based on a rigorous annotation scheme, consists of sufficient size to train a model with acceptable predictive accuracy, and fits our pedagogical scenario in the German language [50]. Business model pitches -also called entrepreneurial or business pitches [72] -are described as "a brief description of the value proposition of an idea or company" [19] with the objective to convince a group of stakeholders of the novelty of an idea. A business model pitch usually lasts between 30 seconds and two minutes [19].…”

Linked but Desynched: An OODA Analysis of Associated Entrepreneurship Accelerator Programs

“…In the literature on pitching, this interlinking across programs has been lightly mentioned (e.g., Spinuzzi et al, 2018), but studies have mainly focused on pitching solely in the context of the incubator or pitch competition (see Sabaj et al, 2020, for a review; e.g., see Cabezas et al, 2020; Galbraith et al, 2014; Spinuzzi et al, 2018; Spinuzzi et al, 2016). Their central focus has been on examining a venture’s more or less linear journey from idea to incubation to exploitation (see Figure 1; cf.…”