Interview preparation and techniques

In my fieldwork interviews with venturing actors I experienced that if I did not guide the conversation or insisted on getting a specific answer to a question as; “how exactly did you get in touch with your sub-contractor?” I would either get rather dull interviews with no real details of practice, or I would get these so-called fairy tales about everything is according to plan. Both outcomes would leave me with a feeling of not getting through to the respondent and of having acquired material that was not useful to my inquiry on how to make a qualitative difference to the young ventures. There are a small number of interviews in the material that sadly fit that description, but even so, they contributed to my learning process as a researcher in this particular field.

Part of the idea behind the ethnographic interview is that both answers and questions should be found in the field, not just at the researcher’s desk (Spradley 1979, 31). I prepared each interview by doing basic Internet searches, exploring the respondent’s personal web identity and media on the venture (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, online articles, webzines etc.), looking into the history of the technology and collecting the material that was already available in-house, in the Accelerator programme. This was a rather time-consuming task but a very important one, as I used the information to find conversation openers, familiarising myself with key concepts of the technology, and establishing some knowledge to hold against the answers in the interview situation (Alvesson 2003, 171). I would also speak with the advisors of the incubating team about specific cases, either before or after the interview. This was not done systematically with all cases but I did it whenever time permitted.

The interviews with advisors and participants contain a lot of ‘everything is going according to plan’ or ‘no problems – no challenges’ in response to my questions, but the preparation prepared me for challenging the idealised narratives. To provoke and get behind the mask, I interrupted the respondents and steered towards pre-defined themes, to avoid the interview being side-tracked by polished fairy-tales and personal desires to speak of certain subjects. I sort of act as the truth speaker – and in my own opinion I have been granted permission to take on this role. I have sought to establish a mutual relationship of being serious about interview situation, and in my own experience I have been taken seriously be the respondents – as they had something they wanted to share with me. Not least because most of them had something they would like me to know about the common subject of support for entrepreneurs – either as provider or receiver.

My notes and observations from the selection process, including Selection Camp, prior to acceptance into the programme have been highly valuable to me in my preparation of the interviews with both participants and advisors. It meant that in many cases, prior to an interview I had observed the entrepreneurial actors present their project and heard the questions from the board and the board’s evaluation comments after the

entrepreneur had left the room. Being present at these events introduced me to the entrepreneurial teams and the technologies, allowed me to listen to the judgement of investors and advisors and gave me an impression of potential and obvious weaknesses of the case from the perspective of both the incubation and the venture industries.

During interview situations, I would sometimes refer to specific events or situations to hear how the respondent had experienced it, to explain where I my knowledge came from, why I was asking a specific question – or to hear their reaction to the selection process itself. As an interviewer and as a participating observant in the field, I have found it crucial to have some kind of answer (knowledge, reflections, questions) to offer that will make the respondents interested and hopefully make them lose some layers of their mask. It is helpful to say something unexpected or to challenge the standardised repertoires of answers, because it makes them alert, curious and makes them either listen or defend their story even more strongly. In my own assessment, I have primarily been capable of having a meaningful conversation about the respondent’s venture and actual processes when I have had relevant and concrete knowledge to challenge the respondent’s statements and answers. As a researcher this makes me co-creator of the meaning of the interview, which is a result of socially situated activities and not objective facts (Fletcher 2011, 69). It is obvious that this type of approach is more like a journalist, than a researcher seeking to establish a room of neutrality. But then again, this was never the purpose with a study where the researcher moves within organisational processes and interactions in an attempt to understand from the inside (Alvesson and Deetz 2000). As an organizational ethnographer by method and action researcher by the nature of the industrial PhD programme, my participation and

engagement has been explicit – as I have been present also with the purpose of having an impact on how actors and the organisation work. To illustrate how this interacting, provocative approach to interviewing have been providing different kinds of answers and how I have acted as a truth speaker, the following conversation excerpt is from an interview with two founders of a venture. The excerpt demonstrates the potential of having knowledge about the programme process from different sources and the potentiality of doing more than one interview with the same respondents in order to explore the process of entrepreneuring.

The excerpt is from our second meeting, which takes place a year after the first interview and six months after them leaving the accelerator programme. A second meeting offers the potential for a certain degree of trust and familiarity to be established between the interviewer and the respondents; they are familiar with the situation and feel relaxed in their own office, which in my interpretation encourages them to articulate their attitudes, beliefs and tacit assumptions freely.

4.12.1. Empirical demonstration: ‘How are Batman and Superman doing today?’

Interviewer: Last time we met, you guys were pretty much Batman and Superman! Do you still have that feeling now – that, ‘yeah, it’s just too cool to be us, and we are going to conquer the world’?

Respondent 1: Ha ha – well, okay – we have taken some knocks for certain things, but it’s a tough industry, so that’s all right.

(Silence)

Interviewer: I would obviously like to hear about these ‘knocks’. Where have you taken these knocks?

Respondent 2: Well, first of all, we have realised that it takes some time to get out there with a new product. We developed our product in six months, which I don’t think has ever been done before. Normally, it would take 5-10 years, so in this regard we are a success. But now it’s all about production and all that stuff, and the procedures in this industry are just really tough. We are retrofitting existing factories, which means that we don’t have our own factories; we reconstruct other factories to make our product.

That’s a huge task, one really needs a lot of technical expertise – and what about the company that you enter into; what’s their economy like, who owns them, are they internationally owned? Then they are short of money, and then there is a crisis. There are all sorts of thing we need to get a handle on, and it’s effing heavy!

Interviewer: But where did you take some knocks?

Respondent 1: It all took longer than expected. But we have been very patient.

Respondent 2: Maybe, we didn’t have the right mindset for this, since we are entrepreneurs in spirit and all – everything has to happen fast. And this has not been fast, we have trudged around in the mud, and you use a lot of energy doing that. That has been our experience, and I think that has been extremely frustrating. But I think that we’re very good at handling it, and we have an amazing chairman of the board and a board who are really good at calming us down and saying that what we are doing is all right.

(… later in the interview)

Interviewer: I also have a question about how you are doing in terms of getting rich.

Respondent 1: What … did you listened to the interview from last year? It – well – it’s getting better. At least we are not getting any poorer. I mean, we’re not doing badly; however, it has become clear to us that it takes some time before this case is up and running.

But we will get very rich. (Laughs)

Respondent 2: It’s kind of funny that we have a bunch of co-owners, and we’ve got company X that’s holding a large share of our company. Then we have our investor, who is slowly buying him more and more of our venture. On the one hand, we claim to be entrepreneurs, and of course we are entrepreneurs, but we are also employees, since we work on behalf of them. So in a way, we are getting a kind of salary that we normally wouldn’t as entrepreneurs.

Interviewer: It does not have much to do with ‘bootstrapping’ it?

Respondent 1: It is entrepreneurship on first class. (Laughs) We have succeeded in making a decent wage agreement, which secures us a regular paycheck and some other stuff, and we may be able to maintain enough ownership for it to be really fun, if all goes well. Our role is not defined as being here forever. For us, this is also a trade-off.

Interviewer: And your investor and that second round of investment did that turn out well?³¹ Respondent 1: What do you mean?

Interviewer: Whether you think it’s a fair deal?

31 From a conversation with their advisor from the Accelerator programme, I was informed that this venture had accepted a second round of investment from their primary investor. This meant that the investor now owned 40% of the venture – and had substantial decision power in terms of what could happen to the venture in the future. During the same interview-round I also interviewed a venture who had rejected this particularly investor – as they could not settle with the offered terms and felt that the terms was constructed in an difficult and unfair manner that would make it very difficult for them to ever profit from their work.

Respondent 1: By and large and all, one would always like to have a little more ownership, but our alternative offers were not any better. One just has to realise that it’s difficult to make the so-called hockey stick, at least to do it fast. And that is where the price on these shares has been set. So – I think it is fair enough, I would have liked to get some more, but I don’t think that I would have given more myself. (Com04R5)

The excerpt reflects that having internal knowledge about, e.g., their funding situation, and being able to ask provocative questions provides an opportunity to gain insights into the doubts and emotional rollercoaster rides of entrepreneuring, which they have learned from. In my assessment, these two respondents have learned about entrepreneuring during the past year. Note how my questions make them reflect about being employees with an entrepreneurial identity – it seems that being a successful start-up (in terms of receiving large funding) is somehow a paradox to the entrepreneurial dream about freedom and much slower in terms of speed than they had expected. Furthermore, it is difficult for them to sidestep the questions because we have talked before, and they cannot tell me that their present situation is according to the original plan. That is not to say that I have tricked them into revealing their darkest secrets, as they still only tell me what they want to, but the demonstration it is an example of how information about their development and learning is generated through the interconnectedness of the researcher, the field and the respondent(s) (Bradbury and Lichtenstein 2000, 552). I impact the study with my background knowledge and observations, and the answers I receive in turn impact my further investigations. I am using my inside knowledge of their past and knowledge about other processes in the field to make them reflect on the present. This brings me closer to learning what is actually going on with the entrepreneurial dream after a year – and also to the very difficult collaboration between entrepreneurs and investors, where immature entrepreneurs are often poorly prepared for negotiations and planning, as they have never signed an investment deal before. I expect that these respondents will handle an investment situation differently if they choose to pursue other opportunities of entrepreneuring. They have already realized that if this project is going to be a huge success – they are probably not going to be one profiting the most – even though they are close to being superheroes! In terms of entrepreneurial learning I believe that they are better prepared for making relational constructions that they benefit from, due to their experiences. In my analysis of the interviews I have been listening for stories like this one - about how planning was conducted, how meetings was arranged, how hypothesis’ was formulated and how programme content and experiences was applied – and furthermore what happened and what kind of reflections the respondents have made from it, in order to evaluate whether the respondents could be expected to act differently next time. This is the way interviewing have helped me evaluate whether entrepreneurial learning happened or not.