Pitching Research Evolution: An Illustrative Example on the Topic of 'Innovation and Financial Dependence'

As a visiting exchange student to the University of Queensland from China, Jie Teng, approached the 1st author inquiring about opportunities for research projects. Recognizing that the student had only limited exposure to research and an unknown appreciation of what it entails, the mentor devised a program of incremental “discovery” and learning, based on Faff’s (2015, 2016) “pitching research” template tool. Under close guidance, Jie was asked to choose a recent academic paper of interest to him and then to reverse engineer a “pitch” for that chosen paper. The target for this exercise was Acharya and Xu (2013, NBER) (now a forthcoming paper in Journal of Financial Economics, Acharya and Xu 2016): a paper examining the topic of “Innovation and Financial Dependence”. The pitching process was completed, in 10 small stages, over a period of about 5 weeks. The current paper provides a narrative of this research journey aimed at helping other research mentors facing similar situations.