Go or No Go: Learning to Persuade in an Early-Stage Student Entrepreneurship Program

Abstract—Background: Early-stage accelerator programs teach new entrepreneurs how to identify and exploit venture opportunities. In doing so, they implicitly teach these new entrepreneurs how to develop and iterate claims. But since this function of teaching persuasion has been implicit and generally unsystematic, it is unclear how well it works. Literature review: We review related literature on the venture development process, value propositions, and logic orientation (Goods-Dominant vs. Service-Dominant Logic). Research questions: 1. Does an entrepreneurship training program implicitly teach new entrepreneurs to make and iterate persuasive claims? 2. How effectively does it do so, and how can it improve? Research methodology: We examine one such accelerator program via a qualitative case study. In this case study, we collected interviews, observations, and artifacts, then analyzed them with thematic coding. Results/discussion: All teams had received previous entrepreneurship training and mentoring. However, they differed in their problem and logic orientations as well as their stage in the venture development process. These differences related to the extent to which they iterated value propositions in the program. Conclusions: We conclude with recommendations for improving how accelerator programs can better train new entrepreneurs to communicate and persuade.IC2 Institut

The Guarded Lambda-Calculus: Programming and Reasoning with Guarded Recursion for Coinductive Types

We present the guarded lambda-calculus, an extension of the simply typed lambda-calculus with guarded recursive and coinductive types. The use of guarded recursive types ensures the productivity of well-typed programs. Guarded recursive types may be transformed into coinductive types by a type-former inspired by modal logic and Atkey-McBride clock quantification, allowing the typing of acausal functions. We give a call-by-name operational semantics for the calculus, and define adequate denotational semantics in the topos of trees. The adequacy proof entails that the evaluation of a program always terminates. We introduce a program logic with L\"ob induction for reasoning about the contextual equivalence of programs. We demonstrate the expressiveness of the calculus by showing the definability of solutions to Rutten's behavioural differential equations.Comment: Accepted to Logical Methods in Computer Science special issue on the 18th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FoSSaCS 2015

On the inevitability of the consistency operator

We examine recursive monotonic functions on the Lindenbaum algebra of $\mathsf{EA}$. We prove that no such function sends every consistent $\varphi$ to a sentence with deductive strength strictly between $\varphi$ and $(\varphi\wedge\mathsf{Con}(\varphi))$. We generalize this result to iterates of consistency into the effective transfinite. We then prove that for any recursive monotonic function $f$, if there is an iterate of $\mathsf{Con}$ that bounds $f$ everywhere, then $f$ must be somewhere equal to an iterate of $\mathsf{Con}$