Mobilizing the silent majority: Discourse broadening and audience support for entrepreneurial innovations

Research Summary Entrepreneurs operating in a public interactional domain face a unique communicative challenge: they must leverage conversations with a small subset of vocal discursive partners to mobilize support from a broader base of silent audiences observing these exchanges. I propose that entrepreneurs who engage with these vocal discursive partners using what I refer to as discourse broadening are more likely to successfully gain support from the broader silent audience. Using a computational linguistics model to analyze discourses on an online platform featuring entrepreneurial innovations, this study finds an inverted U‐shaped relationship between discourse broadening and support from silent audience members. This relationship is moderated by the similarity between the interpretative lenses of discursive partners and silent audience members, which influences the trade‐off between the benefits and costs of discourse broadening. Managerial Summary Entrepreneurs often face the critical challenge of persuading broader audiences to support their novel ideas despite having limited opportunities to interact with them directly. This article examines how entrepreneurs can strategically engage with their immediate conversational partners on online platforms to gain support from a wider base of silent observers. The findings show that entrepreneurs must carefully balance the extent to which they broaden the discourse with their conversational partners to maximize support from the broader audience. They also need to tailor the level of discourse broadening based on how much their conversational partners represent the views of silent observers. These insights reveal a discursive strategy that entrepreneurs can leverage on online platforms to increase the likelihood of success in commercializing their innovations.