Spinuzzi, C., Nelson, S., Thomson, K. S., Lorenzini, F., French, R. A., Pogue, G., ... & Momberger, J. (2014). Making the pitch: Examining dialogue and revisions in entrepreneurs' pitch decks. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 57(3), 158-181.

Spinuzzi, C., Nelson, S., Thomson, K. S., Lorenzini, F., French, R. A., Pogue, G., ... & Momberger, J. (2014). Making the pitch: Examining dialogue and revisions in entrepreneurs' pitch decks. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 57(3), 158-181.

This is an original research article about an entrepreneurial accelerator in Korea. From the sound of it, there were lots of different kinds of entrepreneurs who went through it, and the accelerator did market research for the startup. It sounded more hands on than an accelerator in American but I don't really know. 

The article is about document cycling and revision. The authors are interested in how entrepreneurs or teams revise their pitch deck as they go through the program, or rather, how feedback from the catchers or experts in the audience invites revision and the resultant revision. 

The study is anchored in genre and Bakhtin's dialogism. 

The research question is the following. "As entrepreneurs learn to pitch to unfamiliar markets, how do they revise their pitch decks in interaction with other professional communication genres that represent the concerns of market stakeholders? Specifically, what changes do they make to the claims, evidence, and argumentation complexity in their pitches?" In sum, the article has a genre ecology bent, although I don't know if they draw on Spinuzzi and Zachery. 

Inductive coding approach contextualized with interviews à la Haas and Witte [31], Schuster and Propen [60], and Winsor [76]).

Through the interviews, Author 1 gets the history. So he's getting history from interviews and drafts. 

Looks like they got 13 interviews from a variety of types of personnel at GIP. Not the actual startup teams. Not yet. Did they not get a chance to interview the startup teams????

Sounds like this was almost archival. Sounds like they selected the year from the archive that best represented the cycle as a whole. 

Yea, they were going for completeness. So they went to year five of the archive, then there were 25 finalists that year, then they selected 14 of the 25 because those 14 had more or less complete sets of documents pertaining to fig. 1, the genre cycle (if I can put it that way):

• Applications
• Initial deck
• Deep dive comments
• Potential commercialization market report (Quicklook)
• Final deck

I'm confused as to how this used an inductive (themes) and deductive (Toulmin) coding approach at the same time. 

Later on in the article, that Toulmin vocabulary is obviously coming back. So they coded for arguments, then just coded for whatever else showed up? like a shotgun approach? Or rather, they used Toulmin to code for revision, since they can tell that way if the startup is changing the way it's substituting evidence, changing its argument, qualifying its claims, etc.--but then why inductively code? just to see if anything shows up?

OK, this is what I think happened. Check this out. "Consequently, the interviewees described at least four difficulties these entrepreneurs faced in making these pitch arguments: 1) identifying and characterizing a specific target market, 2) expressing benefits for that market (including relieving problems faced in the current market), 3) describing an appropriate business model for producing those benefits, and 4) supplying evidence for their arguments above." This you could find only as a result of inductively looking for themes. 

But in order to code for revision, you'd need to look for changes to the pitch as argument. "We began this paper by describing how K5080 developed its pitch for the global market. In K5080’s pitch, we saw definite development: K5080 qualified its claims, provided rebuttals to concerns, and brought in new evidence to support the claims. In this case, the training seemed to be a success."

Table III shows what slides were added and subtracted from the pitch decks, thus echoing the Belinsky and Gogan insofar as the latter were showing selection and salience. 

Just for review, Figure I shows the genre ecology, but they don't call it by that name. They say five phases of the GIP. Phases. What you should do then is, in your Rhe309k course is, ask if there are any genres on the other side of the fence so to speak. What genres do employers use to categorize employees? what genres circulate on their end? and how do these genres change in different industries?

Oh but you just noticed this. There are three different sections to Fig 1. In the top, entrepreneur teams; in the middle, the GIP; at the bottom, the judges. 

Table I shows the different genres involved specifically in developing the pitch. Again, there are five: 

• Applications
• Initial deck
• Deep dive comments
• Potential commercialization market report (Quicklook)
• Final deck

I don't really get Table II. Deliberation? What does that mean? Oh, two different interviews. Spinuzzi interviewed some people for some purpose and the other authors interviewed other people for other purposes. Background interviews, deliberation interviews. 

Table IV lists claims that became more specific. All in all, they're showing change through time. 

OK, I didn't think they were going to get back to the stanza thing (Saldana) but they did in Table V. It looks like the stanza thing has to do with a way of modeling the data, or rather, preparing the data for modeling. So the stanza is the unit of analysis. But then why didn't they use the utterance if they were already using Bakhtin?

"They should also examine revisions in terms of how and when entrepreneurs reuse claims and evidence from other documents."--doesn't another paper do this?

Don't forget about the business proposal citations. "Researchers have studied document cycles of proposal and grant writing, particularly in terms of how writers have composed and revised to address the needs of multiple stakeholders as represented in ancillary documents (such as [9], [17], [70] and [78]." And again: "These “catchers” might then examine other materials, such as specific business proposals, as Clark [11] argues. (For professional communication research into business proposals, see Beck and Wegner [7], Broadhead and Freed [9], Convertino et al. [12], Kent-Drury [35], McIsaac and Aschauer [44], Sales [58], and Zachry et al. [78].)"

I also don't see where this whole opening-up-to-complexity thing is coming from. "PS, I am thinking about your insight regarding how these decks portray milestones/roadmap as a single path rather than multiple branching paths. This is a great insight in that it is so different from what we see in the incubation stage, in which the process involves multiplying potential paths and engaging with cocreation with different stakeholders. I'm specifically thinking of the pivots we saw in London et al and Pogue et al articles (Korea and Portugal programs, respectively), in which the VP is changed in terms of argument, application, design, and/or financial model. The process is iterative and involves changing partners / articulating the tech to different concerns. One of my collaborators, David Guile, and I worked up some figures (so far unpublished) to describe this process. In these, the different shapes represent different stakeholders who are brought on board, continue for a while, then drop off, leaving their mark on the collaborative object (in this case, the VP). "

https://utexas.box.com/s/k5lzjfh3waqdgjc58avz2hgkp3e91v7r