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 contr...