From hype to reality: exploring the entrepreneurial practices of hyping, evaluating, and future-making in an innovation competition

Abstract

Based on a two-year ethnography of a public-private innovation competition for health and social care, the main body of this thesis is structured along three empirical papers that focus on three distinct yet related entrepreneurial practices, representing an inquiry into the content, evaluation, and location of entrepreneurial pitches. The first paper studies the future-oriented content of pitches by examining how entrepreneurial actors manage hype by developing and modifying hyped expectations in response to or in interaction with resource-holding audiences during entrepreneurial pitching. The second paper looks more closely at how entrepreneurial pitches were evaluated in practice. The third paper examines an understudied location of entrepreneurial pitches by studying the particularities, problems and remedial actions needed to organise pitching and other future-making practices in online settings. Taken together, this thesis offers novel empirical insights into important but under-researched sites and moments related to the entrepreneurial pitch and the surrounding practices of hyping, evaluating, and future-making by integrating and forging new links between literatures on entrepreneurship, organisation, valuation, and future studies.