Spinuzzi, C., Altounian, D., & Pogue, G. P. (2020). Go or no go: Learning to persuade in an early-stage student entrepreneurship program. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 63(2), 100-117.

Spinuzzi, C., Altounian, D., & Pogue, G. P. (2020). Go or no go: Learning to persuade in an early-stage student entrepreneurship program. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 63(2), 100-117.

This is an original research article about an early-stage entrepreneurial training program names SEAL, which was at a university and therefore didn't take an equity stake in the company. The accelerator is focused on the go or no go stage, not necessarily on readying the startup to take on a venture opportunity. That would be later on. 

The paper's RQ is about implicit persuasion. 

• Does an entrepreneurship training program implicitly teach new entrepreneurs to make and iterate persuasive claims? 
• How effectively does it do so, and 
• how can it improve?  

Literature review focused on three areas.

• venture development process (to better understand what sorts of arguments ventures had to make at different stages, and to whom)
• goods-dominant logic and service-dominant logic (to better understand perceived grounds of these arguments, specifically value propositions)
• value proposition iteration (to better understand how entrepreneurs’ arguments developed over time)

For starters, I think that whole stasis of fact issue that you've been thinking about needs to be added to each section or you write more or less. But more importantly, recall what you were thinking about the other WC article with SEAL? You were like, these are really weird rhetoric articles. And they are. They're doing rhetoric from a business perspective, so S must have just searched for startup articles with "rhetoric" in them. 

Vogel's model made it into the synchronic paper. You were wondering where that came from:

• In the first stage, venture ideas arise from observations, market insight, or experience that point to potential value, but these ideas are still ill-defined and not yet actionable [25].
• In the second stage, the ideas are iteratively investigated, resulting in a venture concept that links customer need and customer definition with the venture’s offering [26]. (SEAL supports the venture concept stage, ending at the point of evaluation (the Go/No Go decision).)
• In the third stage, the concept matures into an actual venture opportunity by uniting the concept with market conditions and the entrepreneurs’ own goals and beliefs [24], resulting in a plan to bring to the marketplace a product or service that offers differentiated value. 

"The key elements of a value proposition are the linkages between 

• customer need, 
• customer definition or segmentation, and 
• the entrepreneur’s offering [27], as well as 
• the resources and capabilities."

See fig 2. 

In goods dominated logic (GDL), the product is inherently valuable or not, whereas in service dominated logic (SDL), the product only has value as the result of a co-creation of sender and receiver. (Vargo and Lusch) The distinction is also phrased between use and exchange value. GDL fails to keep in mind the product's use value (primary contradiction!)

Oh, oops, S et al had more developed research questions. 

1. Does SEAL implicitly teach new entrepreneurs to make and iterate persuasive claims? That is, although SEAL did not include an explicit component on persuasion, did it implicitly include persuasive instruction in its programming, final products, and unstructured components such as mentoring?

2. How effectively does it do so, and how can it improve? That is, did entrepreneurs develop their persuasive claims throughout the program? Did they iterate these claims? If so, how? If not, why not? Based on this analysis, can SEAL improve its instruction on persuasive claims? 

They got 8 firms (see participant table), which will be two more than you have to do for summer of 2021! 

And yea, now that you think about it, by not collecting a lot of data, you're just short changing yourself later on.  

Anyways, they collected a lot of different kinds of data

• pitch decks
• BPPFFs
• video recorded pitches
• structured training, lunch and learns
• initial and final interviews with the teams
• interviews with the mentors

They triangulated like thus (which amounts to comparison across data sets):

• The initial value proposition: We compared firms’ initial interview statements about their value propositions with their initial (kickoff) pitch decks.
• The initial understanding of their challenges: We compared firms’ initial interview statements about their challenges with the kickoff mentor forms.
• Changes in the value proposition: We compared firms’ initial and final interview statements about their value propositions’ initial and final pitch decks with their mentors’ interviews
• Outcome: We compared the firms’ changes in their value proposition to their Decision Day outcome (Go, No Go, or Pivot) and rationale.

"We found that the entrepreneurs had all received some sort of entrepreneurship training or mentoring before SEAL. Interestingly, the majority of entrepreneurs in our sample were oriented to a problem rather than a technology, a disjuncture that affected their fit in the program (which had been structured to help technology-oriented innovators). Entrepreneurs generally began with a GDL orientation, but despite the lack of formal persuasion instruction in the structured component of the program, many moved to an SDL orientation by the end due to the unstructured component: direct and indirect feedback from mentors. Perhaps most critically, we found that entrepreneur teams were at different points in the Vogel cycle, meaning that some were too early to benefit from the program and others were too late."

Three sections in the results: 

• entrepreneurship training backgrounds, 
• orientations to the problem, their logic orientations, and 
• point in the Vogel cycle 

It's funny how S et al is still back doing de facto Perry stage analyses. Where are these firms developmentally, given this specific template (Vogel)? See fig 3. 

Where are there only 4 firms in fig 3? where are the other 4?

Three gaps in conclusion.

• "One gap was due to a mismatch between SEAL’s envisioned technology orientation and the actual orientations of firms. SEAL was set up to support firms that had developed a technology and sought a problem to which it could be applied, and had developed a firm venture idea that they were ready to incubate as a venture concept. Yet, out of the eight selected teams, only two had a genuine technology-first orientation (H2, T1); two others partially fit this orientation (W1, W2). Of these four teams, only two were actually in the incubation stage (H2, W1), with the other two being in either the venture idea stage (T1) or the venture opportunity stage (W2).
• Another gap was in the program itself. Specifically, although the program implicitly attempted to reorient firms from GDL to SDL, it did not offer explicit instruction in how to reorient. Consequently, teams varied widely in terms of how much they reoriented, with some teams (e.g., T1) retaining a GDL orientation even at the end.
• A third gap had to do with stage. Although SEAL was set up as an incubator—incubating the venture concept—some teams were at the previous or subsequent stage, either still working on their venture idea or already exploiting their venture opportunity."

They actually make recommendations in this article, although I'm not seeing the point of the difference between the implications and the conclusion, since both seem to deal with gaps before the recommendations. To be more specific, it deals with the difference between gap and problem--what's the difference?

https://utexas.box.com/s/ycg3shi5yi9zad79d35nzkhodsl5srj6