Entrepreneurial Imagination Research Articles

Curiosity and curious search in Entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT Entrepreneurship research rarely explores and explains how people approach ambiguity differently as they combine knowledge during the entrepreneurial journey. In this paper we introduce curiosity as a source of intrinsic motivation that addresses this shortcoming. We find that the full range of curiosity-driven entrepreneurial behaviour is not well-described by terminology found within the curiosity literature, such as ‘specific curiosity’ or ‘diversive curiosity’, which have characterized curiosity according to excessively ‘configurational’ mixes of features. For that reason, we develop a new classification system based on behaviour. By focusing on three dimensions – the approach towards ambiguity, emotional valence, and experimentation versus theorization – we develop a unique 3 × 2 typology of ‘curious search’. The six forms of curious search – tweaking and sleuthing (what we call ‘clarifying’ types of curious search), spelunking and stargazing (‘adventuresome’ types), and fiddling and wool-gathering (‘bored’ types) – are described and illustrated in a variety of entrepreneurship situations, and are also shown to apply to a variety of existing entrepreneurship research topics, especially entrepreneurial imagination.

Center The Driving Force of Entrepreneurial Performance in Microenterprises

The entrepreneurial imagination and ideas of micro-entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in fostering entrepreneurial success, serving as the driving force behind entrepreneurial performance. However, traditional entrepreneurial theories have predominantly employed symmetrical approaches for development and examination. This study aims to utilize Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to unveil hidden asymmetries in the data and explore diverse pathways to success for micro-enterprises. By identifying the configurations of entrepreneurial imagination and ideas that contribute to the dynamic development process of micro-entrepreneurship, this research seeks to provide profound insights into how individual imagination and ideas influence entrepreneurial dynamics. Through the application of fsQCA, our endeavor is to offer a novel perspective to entrepreneurial theories.

Impact of Entrepreneurial Ideas and Imagination on Employee Performance in Microenterprises

In microenterprises, entrepreneurial ideas play a pivotal role in propelling business development. Within the intensely competitive business landscape, small enterprises necessitate heightened creativity in crafting each product to attain success in the market. A critical factor in fostering creativity is the quality of resources, with a particular emphasis on human resources. This study utilizes Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) as a research method to dissect asymmetries in the data and uncover the impact of entrepreneurial imagination and idea configurations on the dynamic process of employee performance. The findings shed light on the intricate relationship between entrepreneurial ideas, entrepreneurial imagination, and employee performance, offering valuable insights for both business management and human resources management.

Pivoting to Startup Success: Entrepreneurial Imagination and the Generation of New Business Options

Pivoting to Startup Success: Entrepreneurial Imagination and the Generation of New Business Options

Closing the Product Utility Gap: How Tech Entrepreneurs Imagine Unknown Client Markets

What drives the entrepreneurial imagination of unknown client markets? Based on a multi-case study of tech entrepreneurs operating out of Boston, this study examines this under-researched question. Findings suggest that tech entrepreneurs imagine unknown client markets in increasingly sophisticated ways, starting from envisioning primary users of the product, to considering multiple parallel client populations, to imagining interdependent client groups using the product in complementary ways. This evolution in thinking seems to be driven by product utility gaps - perceived gaps between the range of product uses and client constellations in which the product can create value. Importantly, at an early stage of the entrepreneurial process, these product utility gaps do not result from market feedback, but from ongoing reciprocal imagination of client markets and underutilized product value. Findings inform research on entrepreneurial imagination and opportunity idea formation, and the strategizing of business ecosystem relationships.

‘How might we?’: Studying new venture ideation in and through practices

Recent scholarship focuses on new venture ideation—the process of generating and developing new venture ideas—separately from venture development, as the creation of new ventures begins with new venture ideas. In this study, we ask which practices are being enacted to carry out new venture ideation, and how and why are they constituted by aspiring entrepreneurs. By conducting a video ethnography, we find that aspiring entrepreneurs utilize six practices, i.e., ‘how might we’, ‘seeing’, ‘do you mean’, ‘yes, and’, ‘invitation’, and ‘but, what’ linked to the formulation, explaining, extending and questioning of new venture ideas. Our study extends the relational perspective of new venture ideation by detailing the relations between conversation, bodies and visual artefacts that facilitate the joint exercise of entrepreneurial imagination.

Entrepreneurial imagination: Insights from construal level theory for historical entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial imagination is core to the entrepreneurial process but hard to study in the present. Methodologically, historians have the advantage of reconstructing entrepreneurs’ future thinking in their time. However, traditional historical methodology offers only limited tools to analyse and interpret uncertainty in historical future-oriented sources. In this paper, we suggest that Construal Level Theory (CLT), a theory in social-cognitive psychology, represents a complementary resource to deal with uncertainty and analyse the role of entrepreneurial imagination in evaluating and selecting business opportunities. We elaborate on four manifestations of abstraction suggested by CLT: desirability vs. feasibility, primary vs. secondary aspects, words vs. pictorial representations, and small vs. large categories. We further explain how insights from CLT can raise important questions for source analysis and facilitate comparisons, and then demonstrate it by investigating Thomas Edison’s ego-documents. We conclude by sketching a future interdisciplinary dialogue with entrepreneurship scholars and psychologists.

Examining the Nexus Between Entrepreneurial Imagination and Venture Innovativeness

The new venture creation process begins when entrepreneurs come to imagine their venture ideas, yet we lack a comprehensive understanding of the imagination-innovation nexus for entrepreneurial ventures. In this research, we take a dynamic approach and combine entrepreneurial imaginativeness perspective with schema theory to argue that entrepreneurial imaginativeness will influence venture innovativeness and this relationship is likely to be contingent on the founder’s knowledge depth and breadth. Using a two-step process and combining data from a survey of 98 entrepreneurs and secondary sources, we show that entrepreneurial imaginativeness enhances venture innovativeness and the founder’s knowledge component has a differential effect on this relationship. More specifically, we hypothesize that knowledge depth constraints the effect of imaginativeness on venture innovativeness, while knowledge breadth enhances the effect of imaginativeness on venture innovativeness.

Why do disequilibria exist? An ontological study of Kirznerian economics

AbstractIn his influential critique of mainstream economics, Israel Kirzner rejected the notion of equilibrated economies in an attempt to develop a realistic account of the workings of entrepreneurial markets. Key to Kirznerian analysis are the arguments that (i) economies do not equilibrate because there always exist unexploited opportunities, and (ii) opportunities remain unexploited until ‘entrepreneurially alert’ individuals discover them. This paper draws from Tony Lawson’s philosophy of economics to explain that Kirznerian economics is no more realistic than mainstream. According to Lawson, it is the ontological commitment to closed systems thinking—not superficial theoretical features such as equilibrium—that makes mainstream economics unrealistic. I argue that Kirzner’s theoretical system similarly presupposes a closed system ontology. Whereas the mainstream worldview presumes the instant exploitation of opportunities, the Kirznerian worldview presumes their delayed yet unavoidable exploitation. The ontological critique of Kirznerian economics simultaneously facilitates the reorientation of entrepreneurship theory towards genuinely realistic modes of thought. This is feasible once we acknowledge the non-empirical ontology of ‘entrepreneurial opportunity’ and concomitant fallibility of the ‘entrepreneurial imagination’: opportunities remain unexploited because (inter alia) their existence is known only after their actualisation. The existence of economic disequilibria does not require non-actors who are blind to opportunities, and there is no mysterious force of ‘entrepreneurial alertness’ guaranteeing their eventual exploitation and inevitable movement towards economic equilibria.

Mind, Body, and Soul: A Spiritual Perspective on the Entrepreneurial Imagination

We develop a spiritual perspective on the entrepreneurial imagination, addressing imagined futures in this “conversations and controversies” section on entrepreneurial futures. Specifically, we blend heterodox ideas from various yoga traditions, experiential sources of religion, and the work of poet-mystic William Blake. These diverse sources echo related ideas in a coherent way—uniquely embracing both transcendence and immanence, both mind and body. We structure our argument around the latter binary, making connections to spirituality and entrepreneurial imagination in each domain. We begin with the mind, acknowledging imagination as a mental act. Specifically, we explore the conscious, unconscious, and spiritual mind. We then turn to the body, recognizing imagination’s bodily basis. In particular, we investigate the corporeal, sensory, and spiritual body. Before offering some concluding thoughts, we discuss implications for entrepreneurial imagination with a focus on walking meditation (and contemplative practices of walking more generally) as one potentially fruitful way to engage mind-body-spirit and the forward-looking entrepreneurial imagination.

On Entrepreneurial Stories: Tolkien’s Theory of Fantasy and the Bridge between Imagination and Innovation

Innovations are the product of entrepreneurs’ imaginations. To turn imaginations into realized innovations, entrepreneurs must attract the resources necessary to create the innovations they envision. Resource acquisition involves crafting and communicating compelling narratives that persuade stakeholders to provide resources. However, there is not a clearly articulated theory linking entrepreneurial imagination, narratives, and the production of innovations. To construct such a theory, this paper extends work on narratives in literary theory and, specifically, Tolkien’s theory of narrative fantasy. It is proposed that entrepreneurs’ narratives about innovations are, initially, “fantasies” because they describe possible worlds in which the imagined innovations exist. As fantasies, the characteristics of persuasive fantasy narratives, such as the degree to which narratives achieve an inner consistency of reality and suspend audiences’ disbelief, influence entrepreneurs’ ability to convince stakeholders about the viability of imagined innovations. The proposed theory contributes to entrepreneurship scholarship by developing a process model that articulates how entrepreneurs’ imaginations manifest in their narratives, which, in turn, influence the realization of innovations. The theory generates concrete implications for entrepreneurs and suggests that as the novelty of an imagined innovation increases, it becomes more critical for entrepreneurs to construct compelling narratives to describe the innovation. Thus, entrepreneurs and scholars should be attentive to the role narratives play in moving beyond the idea phase of entrepreneurship and bridging imagination and innovation.

Entrepreneurship in a theory of capital and finance—Illustrating the use of subjective quantification

In order to identify an entrepreneurial opportunity, calculation is required. The entrepreneur must do more than simply perceive an opportunity to do something new to create value in the marketplace. Insofar as alternative possible actions exist, the entrepreneur must choose between them. And even as the chosen opportunity is pursued, he must choose between alternative modes of production and organization in the ongoing combination of resources. The details of the kind of calculation required have been left mostly implicit in the literature. This article borrows from the finance literature to suggest a general and universal framework for such calculation and to offer one possible more specific method for using that framework for ongoing entrepreneurial judgment calls. We describe the familiar context in which entrepreneurial decisions occur and reiterate the importance of understanding the nature of capital in such a context of subjective value, uncertainty, and entrepreneurial imagination. We describe the familiar universal present value arithmetic and how it applies to entrepreneurial calculation. Finally, we take a deeper look at this framework, providing an example of one method of analysis used in financial management.

Intenciones empresariales y comportamiento como la creación de negocios: basado en la teoría de la evidencia de extensión de comportamiento planificado de universidades y empresarios polacos

The purpose of this research was to analyze the relationships between the factors that influence entrepreneurial Intention (EI), using a modified version of Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour (TPB), considering the perception of behaviour. This examination depended on participants' demographic characteristics and psycho-social behavioural traits of attitude (ATT), Subjective norm (SN), and perceived behavioural control (PBC). The establishment of a new business entails various forms of action to achieve desired results. This research analyzes entrepreneurship as the creation of business by engaging in rational behaviour to optimize the use of available technologies and financial sources. These activities are not standardized: They emerge from the entrepreneurial imagination, the perception of new opportunities, and innovation. The aim of a business is not just to produce and sell goods or services. A company must determine the appropriate means of providing them and choose the values to be adopted in the procedure of doing so. Companies should also identify the actions to be taken so that principals or employees incorporate these values into their activities and establish the character that will permit them to regards options and make correct decisions in keeping with the business’s goals.

The Impact of Chinese Anti-Corruption Policies in Costa Rica: Emerging Entrepreneurialisms

While corruption is an age-old practice, it was in the 1990s that Western financial institutions identified corruption as an urgent problem for economic development in the Global South. In the case of China and Latin America specifically, deep traditions of informality, personal connections, and bribery in both regions heightened worries about corruption's potential role within burgeoning trans-Pacific relations, despite active anti-corruption policies within each country. Rather than evaluating the instrumental effects of these measures, this article highlights the generative potential of anti-corruption policies for Chinese state employees working in Latin America. Specifically, I use an ethnographic lens to explore how Chinese anti-corruption policies have shaped the entrepreneurial imagination and initiatives of Chinese development agents in Costa Rica. In doing so, I highlight how anti-corruption measures proliferate certain kinds of entrepreneurial ventures and subjects while foreclosing the possibility of others, effectively restructuring how business can be done. As such, I argue that anti-corruption policies cannot be understood as simply extending neoliberal privatization or consolidating authoritarian state control; instead, I show how these policies produce a complex assemblage of public-private enterprise that has become central to Chinese post-reform governance as it has gone global.

Creative imagining: Developing and grounding a process model for entrepreneurship

Although imagination has been recognized as essential to the entrepreneurial process, the field of organizational entrepreneurship currently lacks an in-depth understanding of creative entrepreneurial imagination and the processes by which it unfolds. To begin addressing this oversight, we propose a process model of creative entrepreneurial imagination yielding five elements–experiencing, early creating, reaching an impasse and gestating, (re)creating and evaluating imagined futures, and choosing and enterprising. This dynamic, nonlinear process model was developed from a set of readings addressing the topic of imagination from various disciplinary perspectives and grounded in the lived experiences of a team of arts entrepreneurs by means of a 25-month-long case study of a nonprofit venture operating within the music industry. In addition to illuminating the specific processes–self-reflective and embodied, conscious and unconscious–through which entrepreneurs imagine and generate novelty, this paper contributes to the field of organizational entrepreneurship by providing scholars with a basis for further exploring the understudied topic of creative entrepreneurial imagination.

CONSTRAINTS FACED BY PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES IN EMPLOYMENT

The study is absolutely an observational study used to measure empowerment of persons with disabilities through the improvement of entrepreneurial quality, development and imagination. Further research is expected to create, assess, evaluate, the significance of present study in other developing nations. India is frequently depicted as a developing yet a youthful nation. As the nation enters its 65th year of autonomous presence the depiction of youth does not appear to be excessively suitable. It can now be termed youthful by reason of the way that half of its billion or more populace comprises of persons underneath 25 years old and 65% of the populace is beneath 35 years. Every single differently abled individual has a leftover potential force than their non-disabled companions. Six to seven rate of populace in India is individuals with inability almost 8 to 9 crore individuals the number is expanding with mishaps and maturing. About 33% of aggregate number of individuals in India is influenced with some kind of incapacity.

Entrepreneurial Imagination and a Demand and Supply-side Perspective on the MNE and Cross-border Organization

We focus on supply and the under-explored demand-side factors that help explicate cross-border expansion, the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) and organization. We explore how appropriability-informed and legacy-shaped entrepreneurial imagination motivates a process of creation and co-creation of the cross-border business context (such as markets, demand, and supporting infrastructures, including business ecosystems), and when feasible the wider institutional, regulatory and even cultural one, that conventional International Business (IB) literature takes as a datum. This is examined conceptually and by drawing on illustrative case examples. We claim that by focusing on agency, learning, intentionality and demand-side factors, our approach complements, and also challenges extant sometimes static, supply-side, agent-agnostic theories of the MNE and helps appreciate better phenomena such as market, demand and value creation, and co-creation, MNEs without firm specific advantages and born-global firms.

Entrepreneurial cognition and behavior in the discovery and creation of international opportunities

Opportunities have become central to the field of international entrepreneurship (IE), but empirical exploration of the concept and its processes is still in its infancy. Based on case studies of 12 internationalizing New Zealand businesses, this paper unpacks the opportunity construct and distinguishes between discovery, which in essence refers to cognitive dimensions of potential opportunities, and their actualization or creation through cognitive refinement and entrepreneurial action. Hence, it provides a distinctive way of navigating the discovery/creation debate, with its competing ontological positions. It also identifies the role of entrepreneurial imagination as a significant cognitive source of opportunity discovery alongside knowledge.

Where is the Missing Matter?

The additive manufacturing (or the popular 3D printing) is relatively new technology which opens new spaces for entrepreneurial imagination and promises next stage of the industrial revolution. It is creating three dimensional solid objects from a digital file. The printer transforms the file into a material object layer by layer, using different raw materials. Today, the additive manufacturing is successfully used in architecture, medicine and healthcare, light and heavy industries, education, etc. The paper analyses the roles of actors in manufacturing the objects. It starts with the Heideggerian questioning of technology (), searching for the causes of bringing into appearance of the 3D model. According to Heideggerian analysis the technology is represented as an ‘unveiling of the truth'. The paper suggests that the old understanding of matter as a thing-in-itself should be replaced by a new, flexible, fluid, concept of matter, which is more or less manipulable. The matter is no more an occasion for object's taking place. On the other hand, it seems 3D printing technology is reduced to mere means; a simple intermediary, a copier of ideas. From that perspective the paper questioning the problem of action in ANT and search how action and interaction is distributed and how actors constitutes themselves as well as their actor-world.

Revisiting women’s entrepreneurship

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to study women’s entrepreneurship from the family-firm context and radical subjectivist (RS) economics. While women’s entrepreneurship is a long-standing topic of research interest, there have been calls for more theory-oriented research and research which takes context factors in women’s entrepreneurship seriously. The paper responds to this by using an RS’s view of economics as a theoretical lens to consider women’s entrepreneurship in family firms.Design/methodology/approach– The paper briefly reviews the potential of the family-firm context for examining women’s entrepreneurship in a non-reductive fashion, then outlines radical subjectivism (RS). The three main elements of RS’s “entrepreneurial imagination” are explained, then linked with other theories of family-firm behaviour and applied to casework on women entrepreneurs in family firms.Findings– Each element of the entrepreneurial imagination, empathy, modularity and self-organization, generates new research questions which contest previous apparently settled views about women entrepreneurs. Protocols for investigating the questions are suggested. The third element, self-organization, while more difficult to operationalize for empirical testing, suggests how women’s entrepreneurship might generate new industries.Research limitations/implications– While this is primarily a conceptual study, its case studies invite further exploration of both women entrepreneurs and family firms. The RS perspective could also increase understanding of shared leadership and innovation in family firms. Specific research questions and protocols for investigating them are offered.Practical implications– Insights from the research have practical implications for entrepreneurship education, for understanding entrepreneurship at the level of society, the firm and the individual.Social implications– The importance of both family firms and women entrepreneurs to society makes it important to understand both of them better. The RS perspective can help.Originality/value– The paper highlights the value of combining attention to entrepreneurial context (family firms) and theory (RS) to reinvigorate some old research questions about women entrepreneurs. The combination of family firms and RS is also novel.