Accounting for the Entrepreneurial Story: How Accountability Shapes Projective Storytelling

Our research explores how entrepreneurs build support for nascent ventures through storytelling, especially by producing ‘projective’ stories. This interest in the future raises questions about how stakeholders might assess stories and hold entrepreneurs accountable for promises that do not seem realistic or fail to materialise. To address these questions, we investigate how digital entrepreneurs pitch their stories to industry analysts and, in turn, how these analysts hold their stories up to the light. We develop a process-based lens to show how stories are subjected to an escalating scale of accountability where entrepreneurs are asked to defend, and evidence claims. This lens explains both how stories are adjusted in practice and how accountability can reconfigure the processes of entrepreneurs and shape of their ventures. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for research on entrepreneurial storytelling.