Creating Novelty: How Arts Entrepreneurs and Their Customers Co-Create Aesthetic Artifacts

Despite the fundamental role of customers in processes of entrepreneurial creation, the field of organizational entrepreneurship has paid little attention to how novelty emerges from the interactions and collaborations between entrepreneur and customer. To begin addressing this oversight, we venture into a side of entrepreneurship that is often overlooked in research-the aesthetics of entrepreneurship-to explore the relational and creative embodied processes involved in the co-creation of unique artworks. Focusing attention on the field of arts entrepreneurship, we conducted an 11-month-long, multi-sited, micro-ethnographic study of three arts-based ventures, comprising a total of four entrepreneurs, as well as their numerous customers. At the core of our paper, we abductively develop three dimensions of the aesthetics of novelty co-creation: embodied imagination, contemplation, and consensus. We contribute to the organizational entrepreneurship literature by explicating these dimensions, and in the proce...