The Pitch as Meaning-directing Activity: Implications for Students and Education When Fast Pace and a Striving for Novelty Set the Scene

The elevator pitch is part of a global tendency toward homogenization of entrepreneurial content in educational programs (Fletcher, 2018), and this article shows how the pitch is naturalized as a new language because it must be decoded in order to pass an innovation course for health students at a Danish University College. A core communicative component of the pitch is speed. Using pragmatism, the article shows how the pitch guides the meaning making of students and how the compressed time element reduces the space for reflection. Thus, the educational rhythm is set by values from the pitch and innovation. Further, the article problematizes how the pitching situation separates the pitched end product both from reflections on possible consequences of new solutions and from the dynamic forces that actually created the pitch.