"Go or No Go: Learning to Persuade in an Early-Stage Student Entrepreneurship Program"

Spinuzzi et al.'s (2019) "Go or No Go: Learning to Persuade in an Early-Stage Student Entrepreneurship Program" aims to assess whether an early-stage accelerator program effectively teaches its students to develop their businesses's value propositions. 

To conduct this assessment, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) subjected a sample of the program's cohort (n = 8) to an exploratory, qualitative study. In doing so, they collected a variety of different kinds of data (interviews from participants and mentors, slide decks, feedback forms, observations, videos, and surveys), and they interpreted their data vis-à-vis Vogel's three stages of a venture's development. 

Spinuzzi et al. (2019) found that the program was most effective to the group it intended to enroll in the first place, namely, entrepreneurs who were at Vogel's stage two: concepts. However, strangely, only two of the eight in Spinuzzi et al.'s (2019) sample were at this stage, leaving me to wonder: was this small sample representative? Either way, it's strange that so few entrepreneurs were at that stage. All in all, a few entrepreneurs were still at stage one (idea), only a few were at stage two (concept), I think (Spinuzzi et al., 2019, p. 118a), and one was even at stage three (opportunity). Adding to the confusion here is another distinction, the distinction between technology-first and problem-first firms. To be more specific, then, SEAL--the early-stage accelerator program--marketed itself to technology-first firms that were at Vogel's stage two (concept). So, regardless of the specifics, not many firms met the characteristics the accelerator program designed its curriculum for. Yet, the few firms that did fit those characteristics seemed to get the most out of the program. 

Spinuzzi et al. (2019) identified another problem, this one being that the program didn't explicitly teach teams how to iterate their value propositions. Part of the problem, though, was firm's initial orientation. Apparently, based on prior research, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) determined that a service-dominated logic (SDL) is a more effective orientation for early-stage technologies (the orientation is more persuasive because the people who are buying into the technology are less interested in the technology itself). So, the firms that were tech first, which is, again, the kind of firm that the program was marketing itself to in the first place, had the most trouble developing their value propositions. Put differently, problem-first firms had the easiest time transitioning to a SDL, unsurprisingly, because they were only attached to the technology as a means to an end. Now this is me going out on a limb, but I think the problem is, SEAL didn't fully appreciate a tech-first firm's needs. Sure, out of necessity, the firms developed a technology without an eye to how it would be applied in the future, which is why they need the program's help. Or, as Spinuzzi et al. (2019) say, 

...the objective of the program is this Go/No Go decision. Firms leave the program with clarity on whether the business is worth pursuing. That is, firms come into the program  with  a  venture  idea;  they  use  the  program  to incubate a venture concept; and at the end of the program, they decide whether to exploit a venture opportunity [20]. SEAL’s Go/No Go decision thus orients teams such as W1 toward making an evidence-based argument to themselves and others: can this innovation anchor a viable business? (p. 113)

Surely because of the weddedness to the technology rather than a problem, the tech-first firms have a problem transitioning to an SDL orientation. I don't know how to spell out this link exactly, but it would seem like, precisely because of this trouble, the program ought to explicitly teach firms how to develop their value propositions. In fact, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) imply that the program seems to assume that the means to develop a value proposition is a given. Instead, the program ought to aim to develop students' cognitive capacities to shift the conception of a product's market pain to fit a variety of audiences, which would imply a recognition that both firms and audiences co-construct a product's value proposition (London at al., 2015). 

Aside from those recommendations, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) also recommend that the program admit more selectively; that way, they can only admit the students their program is designed to help (tech first, stage 2). Moreover, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) recommend that they appoint each firm a case manager, that way the firms can get more individualized attention, since the manager can drawn on his/her connections to identify what mentors the firms will find most relevant. 

I do have some questions, though. I get why Spinuzzi et al. (2019) triangulated their claims. But why did they even seek to get a sense of the initial understanding of their challenges? and how did reading the kickoff mentor forms against the initial interview statements about their challenges constitute a triangulation of this data point and/or goal? did the study have more than two conditions? and did this condition--if it was one--have to do with the explicit/implicit binary? 

What's more, was it a bad sample? Because I find it strange that only two firms were of the right kind. 

Whatever the case, I feel like what's at stake here is similar to a problem that compositionists know well. The students who need FYW the most don't get enough from it because of how they are predisposed. Inversely, the students who don't really need the class that much (again, because of how they are predisposed) get more from it. Put differently, the class suffers from a preaching to the converted problem, which is itself intensified by a bad marketing problem. I feel like this double problem applies to the incubator too. So, the real question is, how do we get these entrepreneurs to sense the nature of the situation? how can we train them to see what expert entrepreneurs see? and to shift the product's justification given the audience's needs? 

... entrepreneurship training programs such as SEAL should explicitly teach value proposition iteration strategies,  aligning  them  with  the  incubation  stage. Specifically, value propositions could be taught as claims and reinforced with exercises that encourage entrepreneurs to  explore  how  different  claims  can  persuade  different stakeholders. Furthermore, exercises could help firms to recapitulate their core claims across the various genres they must produce, from elevator pitches to funding pitches to marketing materials. (p. 119)

Another question (to Spinuzzi) would be, did the accelerator end up implementing this advice? or is it too soon to tell?

I was surprised at how similar this study was to a curriculum design job. Spinuzzi et al. (2019) were asking questions like, does the program's scaffolding scaffold for what it was intended to? did the program do what it said it was going to do? Prior to this IEEE article, I didn't catch the similarity of Spinuzzi's work to programmatic assessment. There's a lot of literature out there about how to assess a writing program. But how do you assess an organization that only exists ephemerally and has so many moving parts? Naturally, such assessment jobs are the bread and butter of what Spinuzzi does. 

Lastly, I might add, why didn't Spinuzzi et al. (2019) take the structured programing--I think it was called--into account (like the video lectures)? They observed the Lunch and Learns, sure. But they seemed to skip right over a lot of the other scaffolding, focusing so closely on the pitch deck.   

I would be interested in asking whether the recommended exercises would be able to produce in the entrepreneurs the desired capacity. Of course, I have no idea whether they were implemented after the fact. But would they effective? Or can that kind of stuff only be developed over long scales of time?