From Prototype to Pitch: Learning Entrepreneurial Communication Through Gameplay

Abstract

Technical-discipline entrepreneurship students often equate entrepreneurial success with product quality rather than the ability to communicate value. This paper presents a qualitative, practice-based case study of a competitive classroom activity designed to challenge that assumption. The “airplane storytelling game” was implemented over four annual cohorts within an undergraduate entrepreneurship elective on a software development programme, involving approximately 12 students per cohort and 48 students in total. Working in small teams, students designed and tested a paper aircraft capable of carrying a coin before delivering a sales-style pitch to judges acting as investors. Prototype performance and pitch quality received equal weighting. Data were drawn from contemporaneous lecturer observation notes, student comments recorded during post-activity discussion, and reflective teaching notes. The cohort-level implementation, rather than the individual student, was the principal unit of comparison. Across the four cohorts, most teams devoted substantially more effort to technical refinement than to pitch preparation. Teams repeatedly tested folds, wing structures and weight distribution, while pitches were often prepared late and delivered with limited narrative structure. More persuasive presentations frequently outperformed technically stronger prototypes, generating surprise and prompting students to reconsider assumptions about entrepreneurial success. The paper interprets this discrepancy as a form of experiential misalignment: gameplay makes the consequences of underinvesting in communication visible, thereby creating a basis for reflection and conceptual learning. The findings do not suggest that communication substitutes for product quality; rather, they show that technical value must be made clear, credible and relevant to stakeholders. The study contributes a replicable, low-technology example of games-based entrepreneurship education and identifies practical implications for teaching pitching, teamwork, value articulation and the allocation of effort under time pressure. It also acknowledges the limits of cohort-level observational evidence and the instructor’s combined roles as designer, judge and analyst within a single institutional and disciplinary setting and context.