Events

Ms. Yanbo Song
Ph.D. Candidate in Organisational Behaviour
INSEAD

How do creators pitch unfinished ideas to attract attention and foster engagement from early users? I theorize co-creative incompleteness—a communicative stance that frames early-stage ideas or prototypes as unfinished yet promising and open to collaboration. Unlike investor-oriented entrepreneurial pitches that seek resources, participatory idea pitches invite audiences and users into development, blending emotional signals of openness and vulnerability with cognitive scaffolding for sensemaking. Drawing on Emotions-as-Social-Information (EASI) framework (Van Kleef, 2009, 2014) and sensemaking theories (Dervin, 1998; Weick, 1995), I predict that moderate positive emotion (vs. low or high) in vision communication and feedback solicitation during idea pitching maximizes attention and engagement, while linguistic clarity and informational richness generally improve early outcomes but yield weaker benefits when pitches are already highly distinctive. I test these claims in the video-game industry using manually collected 1,921 Steam Early Access releases in 2022, combining NLP of pitch texts with behavioral responses (i.e., followers, viewers, players, reviews). Results show an inverted-U for positive emotion and positive main effects of cognitive cues, with diminishing returns under high pitch distinctiveness. This study introduces co-creative incompleteness as a framework for idea communication and extends research on emotional signaling, feedback interaction, and crowd-based innovation.