3rd Graders, CMU, and the Art of the Elevator Pitch

According to Dan Pink in his latest book To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, the elevator pitch needs updated. I got a chance to try out his ideas as six Baden Academy 3^rd grade Research Fellows visited CMU campus to try out their own version of pitches.

What the heck is an elevator pitch, you ask? There are national “Elevator Pitch” competitions for students in entrepreneur programs.  The term comes from a time when you had a chance to bump into a boss in the elevator at work and had 90 seconds to pitch your idea before getting off on your floor. The pitch needed to motivate the boss into inviting you up to hear more, and hopefully financing your proposed venture.

It is a practice in many University and entrepreneurial training programs to hold Elevator Pitch competitions, for example watch this year’s winner from Stevens University.  Locally, we have a Beaver County Youth Entrepreneurship Collaborative which trains students in business plans and elevator pitches, some K-12 schools offer Junior Achievement programs where elevator pitches are common, and several of my undergraduate students at Duquesne seeking degrees in Entrepreneurial Studies were well versed in the art.  This entrepreneurially exercise is now on national television in the TV show Shark Tank.

The purpose of an elevator pitch isn’t necessarily to “sell” your idea, it is to offer something so compelling it begins a conversation.   Dan Pink argues that we need to think in terms of different types of pitches: the question pitch, the rhyming pitch, the subject line pitch, the Pixar pitch, the Twitter pitch and the one-word pitch. The third grade research fellows I work with at Baden Academy Charter School had a chance to look over the list and develop their pitch for a visit last week to the campus of CMU and Professor Tim Zak of the Director of the Institute for Social Innovation.

The question pitch. Ohio State University research into human motivation demonstrates that pitching with questions is more effective than pitching with a statement. Owen R-K began with “Have you ever had to play a video game that was boring.” He went on to describe how some math education games were so bad they didn’t help him learn so he designed an experiment to customize a video game to the likes and passions of a particular classroom of 2^nd graders and tested if it made a difference.

The rhyming pitch.  Pitches that rhyme are easier to grasp. Pink advises those who must compete against others in presenting before a client that “including a rhyme allows your message to stick in their minds.”  Skylar R., who is making then monetizing a YouTube video of her dancing with robots to raise funds for dance scholarships, included “I was afraid at first glance, then realized they wanted to dance.”

The subject-line pitch. This pitch refers to emails and the research of Carnegie Mellon that utility and curiosity prompt someone to open an email. Pink adds specificity. Kate H. (shy and demure in front of a group) spoke of her semester long inquiry into snakes by opening with “I like dangerous things.” Our interest was piqued as she listed her discoveries, then explained the sculptures she is creating for raffle to benefit groups working with endangered snakes.

The Pixar pitch.  Eli L. used the narrative DNA of Pixar Films:

Once upon a time…  Every day…  One day...  Because of that,.. Because of that….  Until finally…

He used the structure to describe the film he is making about the first year of the media lab. “Once upon a time a group of gifted students came upon a hundred year old science lab… until finally it became a magical place where ideas are endless.

The twitter pitch. Twitter is the ultimate invitation to engage.  Twitter limits you to only 144 characters.  It can be a frustrating task to shorten down a message to that size (particularly when you have to include the link to more information as part of the 144 characters). Ava C. referred back to the headlines generated from her April Fool robot invasion prank to grab the attention of Professor Zak. “Baden Academy students get scary, funny surprise,”  “Baden Academy Invaded By an Evil Robot!”and “Student plays April Fool’s joke on Baden Academy”

The one-word pitch. Professor Zak opened the dialog with the students with the question “What do you think is the biggest problem in the world today?”  This gave Izzy K the chance to share what is behind her children’s story of dolphins, mermaids, and sparkling lakes, “Oil Spills.“ With one word she grabbed his attention and helped him to tune in and listen to more.  The students, as brilliant as their ideas are and as hard as they worked this year, were awed by stories of the CMU Social Innovation Institute Research Fellows.

Professor Zak shared the story of GTech, a local company that began as a graduate project and has planted around Pittsburgh fields of sunflowers to revive and recover contaminated land. We also had a chance to visit the labs of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and its director Justine Cassell.  The kids were on hand to look at a prototype of a digital game interface that is designed to teach students the scientific method and includes the ability for the player to customize his or her digital playmate.  Owen was busy photographing how to ask research questions and display data while Ava and Dr. Cassell got into an involved discussion of the merits of humor in robotic-human interface.

What stood out from the experience for me were the moments when all the pitches, the research, the data faded in the presence of the genuine passions of these scientists, both young and old.  There is a desire to make the world a better place, to make human lives happier, and to authentically engage with people that the campuses of CMU and Baden Academy share.  I am so privileged to be a small part.