Going Beyond Conversational Partners: Entrepreneurs’ Framing and Audiences’ Support for Their Innovations in Online Platforms
Ms. Jamie Seoyeon Song
Ph.D. Candidate in Management, Entrepreneurship Area
INSEAD
This study examines how entrepreneurs engage in communication with audiences to gain their support for entrepreneurs’ innovations. Prior research on framing and social movements suggests that entrepreneurs can garner audiences’ support for their innovations by using interpretative lenses or frames that are similar to those shared among the audiences. When entrepreneurs are engaging in conversations with their audiences in a public domain like online platforms, however, I argue that entrepreneurs’ use of frames that are different from those of their primary audiences would help to gain support from the broader group of secondary audiences who are observing the conversations. By introducing frames that are different from those of their conversational partners, entrepreneurs open up new perspectives in understanding the innovation for the broader observers, thereby expanding the frame that is used to understand the innovation. To test this idea, I use rich conversational data from Product Hunt, an online product discovery platform. I build on the neural network word embedding model, which is a machine learning algorithm for natural language processing, to capture the distance betweeq the frames used by conversational partners in their comments and the frames used by entrepreneurs in their responses. Consistent with my proposition, I find that introducing frames that are different from those of conversational partners increases observers’ support for entrepreneurs’ innovations. This positive effect is stronger when the entrepreneurs’ innovation adopts a nascent market technology, in which case expanding observers’ frames in understanding the innovation is critical, and weaker when the conversational partners are negatively inclined towards the innovation. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of the dynamic and interactive process of entrepreneurial framing and how it cultivates meaning and catalyzes action for a wider audience.
