Director’s cut: exploring the hidden role of startup coaches

This article describe an ongoing study to analyze how different types of artifacts (mainly texts, objects and visualizations) take part in organizing startups, and how they are constitutive in the evolution of the latter. Only a limited set of studies have addressed the role of those who observe and support the entrepreneur while the startup grows, e.g. coaches or mentors. Therefore, we wish to use a design science approach to propose a set of guidelines to design a system that monitor these artifacts to tell the hidden story of each startup. Our survey will allow startup coaches collecting the contribution of each artifact as frames of a movie and to link them together to make sense of what happen during the creation and the evolution of a firm.