Person: Cutolo, Donato
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Donato
Last Name
Cutolo
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IE University
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IE Business School
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Entrepreneurship
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Publication Tell Me Your Story and I Will Tell Your Sales: A Topic Model Analysis of Narrative Style and Firm Performance on Etsy(2020-11-09) Cutolo, Donato; Ferriani, Simone; Cattani, Gino; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Strategy scholars have widely recognized the central role that narratives play in the construction of organizational identities. Moreover, storytelling is an important strategic asset that firms can leverage to inspire employees, excite investors and engage customers’ attention. This chapter illustrates how advancements in computational linguistic may offer opportunities to analyze the stylistic elements that make a story more convincing. Specifically, we use a topic model to examine how narrative conventionality influences the performance of 78,758 craftsmen selling their handmade items in the digital marketplace of Etsy. Our findings provide empirical evidence that effective narratives display enough conventional features to align with audience expectations, yet preserve some uniqueness to pique audience interest. By elucidating our approach, we hope to stimulate further research at the interface of style, language and strategy.Publication Platform-Dependent Entrepreneurs: Power Asymmetries, Risks, and Strategies in the Platform Economy(Academy of Management, 2021-11-29) Cutolo, Donato; Kenney, Martin; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Online digital platforms organize and mediate an ever-increasing share of economic and societal activities. Moreover, the opportunities that platform-mediated markets offer not only attract enormous numbers of entrepreneurs, but also support the growth of entire ecosystems of producers, sellers, and specialized service providers. The increased economic and business significance of digital platforms has attracted an outpouring of studies exploring their power dynamics and general impact. This research has largely overlooked the power imbalance that entrepreneurs experience as members of the platform ecosystem and provided little guidance on how these far more numerous firms should compete. Drawing upon Emerson’s power-dependence theory, we show that the power asymmetry at the heart of the relationship between the platform and its ecosystem members is intrinsic to the economics and the technological architecture of digital platforms. We undertake a conceptual analysis of the sources of this power, and we unravel the novel component of risks that emanate from this imbalance. Our analysis suggests that the conditions of engagement for platform entrepreneurs are so different from traditional entrepreneurship that these entrepreneurs are more usefully termed “platform-dependent entrepreneurs” (PDEs). Further, we explore the strategies that PDEs are developing to mitigate their dependence. Finally, our study provides a framework for policy makers that are considering regulating platform-organized markets.Publication Now it Makes More Sense: How Narratives Can Help Atypical Actors Increase Market Appeal(Sage Journals, 2023-02-06) Cutolo, Donato; Ferriani, Simone; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Extensive research shows that atypical actors who defy established contextual standards and norms are subject to skepticism and face a higher risk of rejection. Indeed, atypical actors combine features, behaviors, or products in unconventional ways, thereby generating confusion and instilling doubts about their legitimacy. Nevertheless, atypicality is often viewed as a precursor to sociocultural innovation and a strategy to expand the capacity to deliver valued goods and services. Contextualizing the conditions under which atypicality is celebrated or punished has been a significant theoretical challenge for organizational scholars interested in reconciling this tension. Thus far, scholars have focused primarily on audience-related factors or actors’ characteristics (e.g., status and reputation). Here, we explore how atypical actors can leverage linguistic features of their narratives to counteract evaluative discounts by analyzing a unique collection of 78,758 narratives from crafters on Etsy, the largest digital marketplace for handmade items. Marrying processing fluency theory with linguistics literature and relying on a combination of topic modeling, automated textual analysis, and econometrics, we show that categorically atypical producers who make more use of abstraction, cohesive cues, and conventional topics in their narratives are more likely to overcome the evaluative discounts they would ordinarily experience.Publication Digital platforms(Elgar Online, 2021-01-19) Cutolo, Donato; Vang, Jan; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Digital platforms have changed the conditions influencing entrepreneurship across the globe. Research has shown that context is critical in understanding how these platforms impact entrepreneurial endeavors. This chapter illustrates how context is critical in understanding and analyzing how digital platforms influence entrepreneurial opportunities. It suggests that digital platforms represent a new type of intersection between the global and the local, where global forces promote conditions of dependent entrepreneurship. In contrast, local forces shape entrepreneurs’ agency in relation to the global processes. We suggest that, to ensure fair competition and just working conditions for platform entrepreneurs and employees within the industry, there is a need for policies not being steered by techno-skeptical or techno-optimistic frameworks but by a balanced approach. Since Joseph Schumpeter at least, it has been recognized that entrepreneurs discover and create opportunities and build new independent firms (Alvarez and Barney, 2007; Audretsch, 2007). More recently, scholars such as Brynjolffson and McAfee (2016) have hailed entrepreneurship as a vital response to the increasing concerns about digitization’s impact on entrepreneurship and the future of work. The impact of digital platforms on entrepreneurship has emerged simultaneously with a recognition of the importance of context in generic entrepreneurship research. Researching context in relation to digital platforms provides a particular challenge to researchers owing to their simultaneous global and localized nature; the interplay between the global and the local is more complex than in most other industries given the high digital interconnectivity and limited footlessness for many types of transactions and activities. A request on, for example, Innocentive, the world’s leading problem-solving digital platform, can be promoted to potential problem-solvers across the globe at the same time.Publication I Wasn’t Expecting That: How Engaging with Digital Platforms Can Turn Leisure Passion into Entrepreneurial Aspirations(Elsevier, 2023-11) Cutolo, Donato; Grimaldi, Rosa; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Online digital platforms are rapidly emerging as new avenues for business activities,opening up a plethora of opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs. These platforms offer a range of resources and incentives that empower passionate users to showcase and cultivate their skills within online communities, creating a platform for these users to transform into producers and entrepreneurs in the digital economy. However, existing research on entrepreneurial passion has neglected the role of leisure passion in shaping entrepreneurial aspirations. This study explores this relationship by analyzing the activities of 20,538 users on YTTalk forum, the largest digital community for YouTubers, from September 2011 through March 2020. Leveraging the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software, we propose a novel methodological approach that utilizes language to infer passion. Our findings reveal leisure passion is not directly conducive to entrepreneurship, yet entrepreneurial aspirations materialize when passionate users become cognizant of the positive attention and recognition they receive from other users on the platform, providing them with the impetus to monetize their content and harness the value they generate for others.Publication A Quantitative Approach to Multimodality: An Application to the Creative Process of Van Gogh(2025) Cutolo, Donato; Sgourev, Stoyan V.; Formilan, Giovanni; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75The paper proposes a quantitative approach to analyzing a “strong” form of multimodality, based on the co-emergence of a key connecting element in different modes of data. It provides a methodological template for the simultaneous analysis of visual and verbal data, which is applied to the domain of creativity. We expand the possibilities for analyzing creativity as a process by drawing on the “Janusian” tradition, using opposition as the key connecting element between the verbal and visual modes. The research context is the creative process of Vincent Van Gogh (1881–1890), as reflected in his letters and paintings. The visual analysis attests to the growing presence of contrast of complementary colors, while the textual analysis provides evidence for increasing affective, cognitive, and behavioral ambivalence. The results corroborate the validity of the method by demonstrating the co-emergence of visual and verbal opposition over time. The method can be used for purposes of exploration or validation. It has broad applications in organizational scholarship.Publication Atypicality: Toward an Integrative Framework in Organizational and Market Settings(Academy of Management, 2023-11-14) Cutolo, Donato; Ferriani, Simone; Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research; European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Research in management and organizational studies has emphasized the importance and the double-edged nature of (a)typicality. Organizational objects that are atypical within a context - in terms of features, characteristics, or behaviors- tend to generate skepticism and encourage rejection by eliciting confusion among relevant audiences, including investors, employees, customers, and partners. However, atypicality is also often cited as a vital source of competitive advantage, as atypical actors and products can attract significant attention, innovate, and even promote structural change in a field. While research aimed at reconciling this inconsistency has accumulated rapidly, this literature has remained fragmentary and scattered across several disciplines, resulting in mixed views, conceptualizations, and perspectives. In this article, we systematically reviewed 129 papers to advance a conceptual model that helps to establish a comprehensive organizational perspective on atypicality. We a) identify three perspectives on atypicality: cognitive, normative, and innovative, b) develop an integrative framework that elaborates on the sources, consequences, and boundary conditions of atypicality, and c) highlight avenues for future studies on this topic. We hope that this review on atypicality will encourage and inform future scholarship in this fascinating domain and elucidate novel opportunities for unleashing the generative potential of this important construct.Publication Untitled(Harvard Business, 2023-10-19) Cutolo, Donato; Ferriani, Simone; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Imagine you are an entrepreneur who loves to challenge the status quo. You’ve just come up with a unique product you’re excited to share with the world, but you’re also worried that people won’t understand it. What should you do?