The Role of the Pitch in Startup Ecosystems - Julia Katherine Haines, Google
Channel: UCIBrenICS
Date: 2017-05-31

UCI Special Colloquium

Dr. Julia Katherine Haines
User Experience Researcher
Google
             
"The Role of the Pitch in Startup Ecosystems"
 
Tuesday, May 30, 2017

 What is key to fostering innovation? Scholars have noted that there has been a fundamental shift in recent years from knowledge being contained within corporations and firms to being contained within an ecosystem of partners. But little is known about the emergent collaboration between parties that occurs in these ecosystems and how it plays a role in innovation. The collaborative flow of ideas between innovation actors is crucial our understanding of how to support innovation, but few empirical studies have actually examined the flow of ideas within these ecosystems. In this talk, I present work from an ethnographic study of startup ecosystems, and I examine the act of pitching as a form of open collaboration and discuss its role in startup innovation.
 
Rather than being a mere rhetorical format for presenting information to potential investors, pitching emerged as playing both a central role in the design of the technology as a product and in shaping the identity of the startup itself. In this research, I draw on the theoretical frameworks of boundary objects and figured worlds to highlight the pitch as a site of imagination for design and an important medium for collaboration. And I explore the act of pitching as integral to the formation of identity and agency of the startup team. I will discuss the pitch as a critical component in the development of these startups and their technological artifacts and the implications on the values inherent in the technologies.
 
Bio:
Julia Katherine Haines conducts research at the intersection of technology, innovation, and human practices. She is currently a User Experience Researcher at Google and a member of the ACM Future of Computing Academy. She received her PhD in Informatics from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine, where she was also a fellow with the Intel Science & Technology Center for Social Computing. Her dissertation research centered on startup accelerators and the decentralization and diffusion of technology startups globally. She previously earned an MS in Human-Computer Interaction at DePaul University, an MA in Social Sciences at The University of Chicago, and BAs in Anthropology and Journalism and Mass Communication (Visual Communication) at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.