The Power Of First Moments In Entrepreneurial Storytelling

Our minds are built to remember stories. Recall watching and listening to an audience respond to the first moments of a story-what engages and captivates the audience? This paper explores motivational, attitudinal, and influential aspects of storytelling with an entrepreneurial streak and specific focus on the vulnerable introductory phase of student responses during classroom design challenges. What motivates students and the way they begin their projects or start-ups are considered during the opening phases of each class, during classroom dynamics and during the introduction of an entrepreneuring story. Stories are examined and informed by previous work. Storytelling is defined and measured by four concepts: self-motivated, ambiguity readiness level, passionate social connections, and empathy. A series of planned prompts alongside classroom work geared towards student quests for entrepreneuring success are qualitatively analyzed using the following two questions:1) How do we introduce and measure the predictive engagement aspect of vulnerability in successful entrepreneurial storytelling? And,2) How do we develop a procedure for applying the storytelling results to the start-up phases of entrepreneurial work and illuminate its effectiveness for delivering innovation.Increasingly, academic and industrial collaborations begin as entrepreneurial expectations for delivering something novel. Defining the first steps of start-ups results in discussions of a series of related concepts: innovation, empathy, and storytelling. While the media is rich with definitions for all terms, the result is diluted and often blurred with overuse, confusing multi-applications and quick fix recipes for success. Students in academic classrooms across disciplines routinely ask for help in communicating and telling their story. Meanwhile, popular culture features industry leaders' use of storytelling in their quest for innovation. Yet, the relationship between academic research and storytelling has been ambiguous. The intent of this paper is to provide descriptive examples and student participant stories for demonstrating effective development in one class episode or development in the foundation for an entire class.This paper explores the power of the very first moments of storytelling during the evolving dynamics of an interdisciplinary graduate design methods seminar and builds method parallels from previous works. The results of student storytelling during their work in the beginning of each class and during the overall dynamics of the class as individual and group storytellers is applied to outside of classroom examination and prototyping of their research and/or their entrepreneurial start-up stories. A theoretical blend of applied psychology, entrepreneurial leadership, and design thinking provides a qualitative focus.