Entrepreneurs need to be pitch perfect: TV’s Dragons’ Den illustrates the way a key skill has to be mastered

Abstract

Purpose

Examines the skills needed to present a good two-minute pitch for a product or service which has been created by the “pitcher”.

Design/methodology/approach

Aims to analyze successful entrepreneurial pitches to provide practical pitch-related advice to entrepreneurs and to business school instructors – the people developing materials to teach the necessary skills.

Findings

Uses a ten-stage discourse framework to reveal the linguistic and rhetorical skills required to make good pitches. Although good pitchers will probably have an instinctive ability to use the appropriate linguistic, grammatical and syntactic features, the analysis here offers an intellectual understanding of a process which can never be entirely mastered instinctively.

Originality/value

The entrepreneurial pitch has, in all likelihood, never been deconstructed in this way, using rhetorical and linguistic discourse analysis.

Citation

Wheatcroft, J. (2016), "Entrepreneurs need to be pitch perfect: TV’s Dragons’ Den illustrates the way a key skill has to be mastered", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 26-28. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-03-2016-0037