A ‘Snowballing’ Pedagogic Strategy for Pitching Research: An Illustrative Example in Finance

Abstract

Faff, Godfrey and Teng (2016) tell the initial story of an undergraduate exchange student (Jie Teng) from Fudan University, China, visiting the University of Queensland. As described by Faff, Godfrey and Teng (2016), the first author devised a program of incremental “discovery” and learning for the second author, based on Faff’s (2015, 2017) “pitching research” template tool. For the initial exercise fully documented in Faff, Godfrey and Teng (2016), Jie Teng chose a recent academic paper of interest to him – a paper on innovation and financial dependence – for which he then reverse engineered a “pitch”. The current paper is a companion piece that documents the subsequent exercise – in which Jie successively chooses one of the key papers in each of three further pitching rounds, thereby producing four linked pitches. In the second stage he pitches a paper on IPOs and innovation. In the third stage he pitches a paper on ownership and innovation. In the fourth and final stage he pitches a paper on corporate control vs. shareholder activism. Accordingly, herein we provide a narrative review of this example, to illustrate a “snowballing” pedagogic strategy to pitching research.

Keywords: Pitching Research; Evolving Pitch Series; Research Journey; Snowball Strategy; Innovation; Financial Independence; IPOs; Ownership; External Governance; Internal Governance

JEL Classification: G32; G34