Interviews – occasions for narrative work

The formal interviews were held in Danish, recorded and transcribed. Most of the interviews with participants and advisors were performed at their location/organisation, indicating that I met them in their own setting. I arranged the interviewed as this on purpose, as a way of experiencing the participants in their own environment and also having time to small talk, getting to know each other before and after the actual interview. Second reason was for me to be as little a disturbance to them as possible, not wasting their time.

Some interviews were also performed in the meeting rooms of the Science Park and in a few cases via Skype.

Due to the amount of interview material, a student aid was hired to do the transcribing. I instructed the student on how to reproduce language, and in all cases, the exactness of the transcription was checked and verified against audio recordings by myself. Formal conversations with incubation programme advisors were conducted, and notes were taken during and after the conversations. These conversations were intended as preparation for interviews with participants, but many of the conversations turned out to offer valuable accounts of the other side of the relationship experience. All interviews were conducted under confidentiality, which is a key concern for most of the respondents. The interview length varies from 30 minutes to 1.5 hour, with one hour being the average.

The interviews have been conducted as ethnographic inspired interviews, as contextually situated and with meaning co-constructed by the respondent and researcher (Spradley 1979, 13). Among the advantages of ethnographic interview are the insights into alternative realities, the complexity of processes and creation, which the interviews produce (Johnstone 2007, 113). The context of incubating activities is a field of salesmen, superheroes and dreamers who are used to telling stories, specifically stories with a certain purpose (in most cases to convince, persuade or impress). I have sought to get behind the initial glorified stories, not necessarily in an attempt to uncover the true story but to discover another story that would tell me more about their daily relational constructions to realise the venture. In many cases, this involves talking about venturing when it gets tough and difficult. Many of the respondents are used to ‘selling’ themselves as legitimate investment opportunities to potential investors, advisors, journalists, boards, managers, friends, family and researchers. ‘Legitimacy building emerges in conversations that entrepreneurs have among themselves, their audiences, and their environments. In narrative terms, legitimacy building may be defined as the pursuit of intertextuality (O’Connor, 2000), or the crafting of the story line of the new company into existing, relevant, generally accepted, and taken-for-granted story lines’ (O’Connor 2004, 106). It seems to me that

entrepreneurs intuitively like to tell nice stories about solid planning, control, and proof-of-concept, strong sales figures and happy customers if they are not challenged or asked to elaborate on their answers. That is also why I elected against the approach and set-up of the phenomenological interview (Thompson et al. 1989, Steyaert 1995) in this study of impact and entrepreneurial learning.

Actors of incubating activities are not homogenous; although it is possible to use categories as ‘entrepreneur’

and ‘advisor’, the individual actors vary in background, values, ways of working, industry expertise – and personal narratives. The interviews with non-homogeneous actors discussed here were carried out in slightly different set-ups in order to produce knowledge about similar processes of incubating activities. My approach to interviewing the actors of the field therefore differs from the traditional phenomenological interview focussing on the respondent’s authentic life-world (Eisenhardt 1989, Cope 2005b) in that it is very specific with regard to which processes of entrepreneurial venturing are being explored, and in the way they are performed by the interviewer. One important implication of working with non-homogenous respondents is that not only the questions but also the questioning and tone-of-voice (using sarcasm, jokes, curiosity. enthusiasm, scepticism and empathy) must be tailored to the individual respondent, and the interview guide is only a guideline.

I prepared interview-guides (Appendix A-F) for the semi-structured interviews for each interview round that investigate the small actions of entrepreneuring in the incubator context, the ordinary events of everyday life, how respondents go about networking, negotiating, selling and preparing the market. For each respondent I

have made tiny adjustments to the interview guide based on my preparation or previous meetings. The interview format was meant to encourage respondents to speak about the details in their work and, to a certain degree, reveal the complexities of creating a profitable venture – either as an advisor or as the

entrepreneuring actor, as the stories I hear are selected anecdotes, memories and reflections (Bruner 2004, 693). My questions concern how they act, why, and how they had the idea in the first place, whom they collaborate with, whom and what they depend on, and how they seek the resources they need. These are difficult questions to answer, and many of the respondents had never previously articulated, in this way, how they worked or even how they thought about it. It is very often only after asking the same question in different variations and listening to what the respondents are really saying that the researcher can uncover these rich descriptions of entrepreneurial actions. Based on my experiences, with respondents telling me their best ‘fairy tales,’ I have deliberately sought to provoke respondents by questioning their ready-made identity

constructions and get beyond their retrospective sensemaking. During the fieldwork I realised that some of the themes I was investigating were more controversial than I had thought – as the themes of learning and outcomes of incubating activities are hard to investigate when actors do not know what to say – or how to express what they got out of it. They want to be polite and tell me that they have used the material and sparring they have got, but in order to get behind the politeness I had to use more insisting techniques of asking – as the role of a journalist and in many ways therefore going beyond the usual image of the ethnographic researcher. This could means saying to them that I did not believe the fairytale or confronting them with knowledge from previous interviews that went against their latest answer.

The interviews reflect profound insights into the entrepreneuring process as viewed from the respondent’s point of view – although we have to remember that these insights are also sensitive to the circumstances of the respondent and the story that they think I would like to hear (Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 11). It is not necessarily how something happened, but how the respondent experienced it, or how he would like to be seen by the world and that is what he acts upon. As Bruner puts it, ‘a life is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold’ (Bruner 2004, 708).

It is not an aspect of the interview technique that all questions were posed with the same wording or in the same order, nor were all the same questions posed to each respondent. Therefore, despite the large number of interviews and observations, the material cannot be used for quantitative conclusions, besides concluding that certain themes are running strong throughout the material and can be said to be important to the practice of advising and co-constructing entrepreneuring processes of technology-based start-ups.