Entrepreneurial pitching: A critical review and integrative framework

Over the past three decades, research on entrepreneurial pitching has grown significantly, with an increasing number of scholars in management, entrepreneurship, and other social science disciplines studying the communication and decision-making processes that surround a pitch. Despite the considerable progress made, research remains scattered across different literatures with little integration so far to explain the pitching process, its key determinants and mechanisms, and its effects. To address this lack of integration, we reviewed 252 papers published on entrepreneurial pitching since 1986, synthesizing the work to date. We found the existing literature bifurcated across two distinct vantage points—one that conceptualizes pitching as driven by the entrepreneur, and the other as primarily shaped by the actions and decisions of the investor. This focus on different actors as causal agents has led pitching scholarship to become largely restricted to one-sided studies and to a proliferation of separate theories focused on isolated processes and effects. As a result, the broader communicative process of pitching, and the mechanisms through which it is constituted, remains undertheorized and underexamined. To aid future research, we integrate existing research into a comprehensive communicative framework and elaborate on the implications of this framework for future research. We conclude the paper by discussing the ways in which theory and research on pitching can better inform pedagogy and practice.