Within this project, we offer five different theses opportunities:
#1 Rating Entrepreneur’s Expressions of Humility
- The concept of humility has long been overlooked in the entrepreneurship literature. Do entrepreneurs portray themselves as particularly humble when they talk about themselves and their ventures?
- Your task is to rate statements by entrepreneurs as humble or not based on an established scale. We provide the dataset with statements for you to rate.
- As the statements are in German, this thesis can only be done by a native level German speaker.
#2 Rating Entrepreneur’s Expressions of Narcissism
- How narcissistic do entrepreneurs present themselves in entrepreneurship podcasts? While there is some work on narcissism in the entrepreneurship literature, it remains unclear how audiences react to it.
- Your task is to rate statements by entrepreneurs as narcissistic or not based on an established scale. We provide the dataset with statements for you to rate.
- As the statements are in German, this thesis can only be done by a native level German speaker.
#3 Why do Entrepreneurs join Podcasts as Guests?
- Entrepreneurs nowadays are frequent podcast guests. But why do entrepreneurs actually go on podcasts? What do they expect to get out of it? What criteria do they use to evaluate whether their appearance was “successful”?
- This thesis would be qualitative. You conduct interviews with at least 10 entrepreneur about their experiences, motives and expectations.
- Interviews could be conducted in both English and German.
#4 Are celebrity entrepreneurs the better guests in podcasts?
- How can you quantify the popularity of entrepreneurs that join a podcast? What impact does it have on the audiences’ reactions to them?
- This thesis would be quantitative. We provide you with a list of names and key performance metrics of their podcast episode. You come up with a popularity score for entrepreneurs or build up on a measure we already tested.
- As entrepreneurs are German, it would be beneficial if you have a basic understanding of written German language.
#5 What questions does the host ask entrepreneurs?
- Interviews are naturally shaped by the questions the hosts asks in the interview. So what does the host in the podcast we examine focus on, and how does that shape entrepreneur’s subsequent self-presentation?
- This thesis would be qualitative or quantitative. We provide the interview data and you could cluster the topics manually or with a ML-approach or topic modeling techniques.
As the interviews are in German, this thesis can only be done by a native level German speaker.
Application Details: The topics are available from now on and will be assigned on a rolling basis. Please send your application (1-2 page exposé on the topic you want to apply for in which you outline a potential research question and literature to build up on, CV, current transcript of records) as a single PDF file to: julia.kirsch@tum.de. If you have any questions, please reach out.