Understanding Imagination in Entrepreneurship

2.1 Opportunities for Conceptual Development

Given the high level of uncertainty entrepreneurs face, opportunities are bound by the limits of an entrepreneur’s imagination (Jones and Barnir 2019: 8) and emerge through a process of effectuation (Sarasvathy 2009) since uncertain contexts enable entrepreneurs to develop unexplored visions of the future (Thompson 2018b). Chandler et al. (2011: 375) empirically “show that causation measures are negatively related to measures of uncertainty and the experimentation subdimension of effectuation is positively related to measures of uncertainty.” Similar to effectuation through uncertainty, Welter, Mauer, and Wuebker (2016, 9) highlight how the most crucial assumption in the bricolage framework is the backdrop upon which entrepreneurial actions occur—to create something from nothing in a context of scarce resources—since resource constrained contexts serve as sources of creativity and innovation (Fisher 2012). In practice, however, nearly all entrepreneurial ventures must face resource scarcity at some level: “so, scarcity is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to consider an actor a bricoleur” (Welter, Mauer, and Wuebker 2016: 11). When an entrepreneur is in a resource-constrained environment, this does not imply that they will rely solely on adaptive bricolage behaviors according to creation theory; this entrepreneur may also use transformative effectuation—in line with imagination theory.

In addition to weak assumptions related to specific contexts (that transformative effectuation and adaptive bricolage tend to be associated with uncertain and resource-constrained contexts, respectively, while strategic planning tends to apply to risky and decision-making contexts), the resolution of competitive imperfections associated with strategic planning behaviors arguably requires some imagination. This implies that without imagination, the behaviors of adaptive bricolage and the planning process would be homogenous—eliminating the basis for any competitive advantage—since entrepreneurial behaviors would be the same across new ventures. From this perspective, imagination is key to enabling unique discovery and creation behaviors; thus, it seems impossible that strategic planning (discovery) or adaptive bricolage (creation) can be successful without effectuation (imagination). Digging even deeper into the weak assumptions regarding the boundaries that separate the three theories of entrepreneurial behavior, the overlap between transformative effectuation and adaptive bricolage further implies that the classical definitions of bricolage (to make do by combining the resources at hand and applying them to new problems and opportunities) and effectuation (to harness a set of means and focus on selecting from the possible effects that can be created) are indistinguishable in practice. After all, are resources not means? Are “possible effects” not the same as “new problems and opportunities”? Are the bricolage-related entrepreneurial behaviors of “making do” and using the “resources at hand” the same as encouraging “means over goals” and “not planning”?

Therefore, although the three theories and the three behavior concepts have been presented as alternatives, new empirical evidence suggests that there are overlaps (necessary complementarities) in their abilities to explain entrepreneurial behaviors. Following the logic of problematization (to identify and challenge the underlying assumptions in existing literature) to generate research questions (Alvesson and Sandber 2011), this paper critically addresses some of the theoretical assumptions underpinning these constructs, given the lack of acknowledgments of or theories about the overlaps (necessary complementarities) between the three theories of entrepreneurial behavior in the literature. To demonstrate how different entrepreneurial behaviors overlap and to explain these overlaps, this study uses empirical data to propose new concepts—at the fuzzy boundaries between the three theories of entrepreneurial behavior.

3.1 Context for this Study (The Osaka Group)

The Osaka Group’s restaurants fully capture and express a creative fusion of traditional Japanese techniques and excellent Peruvian flavors and ingredients; this fusion is called Nikkei (e.g., duck gyozas with a huancaina sauce or a wasabi ceviche). The origins of Nikkei restaurants can be traced back to chef Minoru Kunigami (1918–2004) in the 1950s and to chefs Nobuyuki Matsuhisa (Nobu) and Toshiro Konishi in the 1970s. The Osaka Group did not invent the Nikkei concept, nor is its location in Lima considered the best; this honor belongs to Maido and chef Mitsuharu Tsumura. However, the Osaka Group has succeeded in exporting Nikkei cuisine throughout Latin America while maintaining a gourmet level of excellence that is rarely seen in cases of such rapid international growth. The Osaka Group has restaurants in Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Quito, Bogotá, and Asunción. A Miami location opened in 2020, and a London location will open in 2022. Additionally, locations in Chicago, Dubai, Washington, and Singapore are also planned (“at most, only one per year to preserve the creative fusion’s level of excellence”). The menus of all the Osaka Group’s locations are approximately 80% the same. The remaining 20% varies, based on the availability of local ingredients (e.g., fresh abalone in Chile) and the idiosyncratic tastes and preferences of specific locations (e.g., raw sea urchins in Santiago).

The Osaka Group is not growing through franchising. It is a complex alliance of strategic equity partners who are chosen based on their local know-how (“networks, markets, suppliers, labor, and taxes”). Thus, to grow without franchising, the Osaka Group currently opens foreign restaurants only with local partnerships, ideally with a 50/50 ownership ratio. Other than local partnerships, the strategic alliances of each restaurant’s location include “clients, friends, suppliers, and sponsors,” in addition to a manager, a head bartender, a chief of service, Itamaes (sushi chefs), and can also include competitors. Itamaes are particularly important because they are difficult to find, and it can take several months or “even years” to train them. Years ago, before opening the Osaka Santiago restaurant, the Osaka Group made its most valuable investment by recruiting chef Ciro Watanabe as a key strategic partner for growing beyond Lima and Buenos Aires.

3.2 Focal Units of Analysis (Three Entrepreneurs)

Because effectuation and bricolage focus heavily on the actions of entrepreneurs (Parker et al. 2021; Welter, Mauer, and Wuebker 2016), this study focuses on the stories of three exceptional entrepreneurs: the two founding owners of the Osaka Group and their corporate chef. Owners Diego Herrera (DH) and Diego de la Puente (DLP) and chef Ciro Watanabe (CW) participated in six rounds of interviews between 2016 and 2018. These three key informants are relevant to the case in this study because they have been the Osaka Group’s most important decision-makers since the venture began. Access to these key informants was made possible through a long-term friendship between the author of this paper and DH (which began in the early 1990s, when they were college roommates). This situation established familiarity and increased the willingness of the respondents to freely express their ideas and differences. Morgan (1993) argues that observing subjects in a familiar environment is crucial to understanding the intrinsic meaning of a specific phenomenon because a familiar environment enables a researcher to become close enough to his or her respondents to obtain valid data. This is particularly important when discussing sensitive topics, such as culinary innovations, with information gatekeepers.

Sarasvathy (2001a: 247) argues that an entrepreneur’s journey can be the result of a wide variety of serendipitous events. The case of DH is not an exception. After just graduating from college in 1996, Mr. Herrera started on a journey that included surfing in Indonesia for many years. To pay his expenses, he often worked at sushi bars, where he initially conceived the idea for the Osaka Group’s restaurants. DLP has a similar story. Following DLP’s initiative, the Osaka Group and “4Ocean” (a global movement to remove trash from the Pacific Ocean and inspire people to work together for cleaner oceans) recently made joint efforts toward increasing the sustainability of marine life. CW (1980–2020) had an entirely different story. CW embodied the Nikkei concept: he was Peruvian by birth but had a strong Japanese heritage. He first started cooking at a traditional Japanese sushi restaurant called Matsuei. Like many before him, CW experimented with Peruvian ingredients and techniques, producing what is commonly known as Nikkei cuisine. He joined the Osaka group in 2005. Although he resided in Santiago de Chile from 2009 to 2019 and was part owner of the award-winning Santiago restaurant, CW also served as the corporate chef of the Osaka Group.

Of the three entrepreneurs, CW was the artist—the culinary innovator. Indeed, artistry and innovation are common among haute cuisine chefs. In task- or craft-based organizations, such as haute cuisine enterprises, creativity tends to be aimed at creating customized products through incremental innovation, skilled craftsmanship, and artistic style (Stierand 2015: 602). Haute cuisine, which is a craft business composed of professional organizations with chefs who typically undergo long and difficult practical training that involves the refinement of their five senses for professional cooking, entails creating truly novel culinary concepts (Stierand 2015). The culinary innovations that were implemented by CW have brought the Osaka Group’s cuisine to the point of potentially receiving a Michelin star.

3.3 Phenomena of Interest (Entrepreneurial Behaviors)

Given the replicable nature of the research strategy of this study, the concepts shown in Table 2 are measured as entrepreneurial behaviors. This implies that the study focuses on capturing the intricacies of the firm founding process by analyzing the actions taken during the emergence of a new firm, using each observable behavior of entrepreneurs as an individual phenomenon of interest (Fisher 2012). Entrepreneurial behaviors are useful, common observable actions that can be employed “to compare and contrast the prominent emerging theoretical approaches for entrepreneurship research”, such as effectuation and entrepreneurial bricolage (Fisher 2012, 1020). The measurable items used to operationalize the behaviors that underlie adaptive bricolage, strategic planning, and transformative effectuation, which are reported in Table 2, are consistent with those used by Chandler et al. (2011).

3.4 Research Strategy (ATS)

The alternate templates strategy (ATS) was popularized by Allison (1971) in his study on decision-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. When using the ATS, a researcher first proposes several alternative interpretations of the same phenomenon, based on different but coherent sets of a priori theoretical perspectives (e.g., the theories of discovery, creation, and imagination in entrepreneurship). The researcher then assesses the extent to which each theoretical template contributes to a satisfactory explanation (Langley 1999). This strategy has often been used for studying entrepreneurial decision processes (Fisher 2012) because of the difficulty involved in developing a unique model of decision-making; indeed, it functions as a powerful research tool that can be used to derive insights from a single rich case (e.g., the Osaka Group) because different theoretical interpretations provide a basis for the necessary comparisons (Yin 1981). The ATS tends to provide an effective platform for comparing theories in a given context. As such, in this study the ATS was used to provide an accurate comparison of the examined theories and show how these theoretical lenses are related to the entrepreneurial behaviors of adaptive bricolage, strategic planning, and transformative effectuation.

Following Fisher’s (2012) methodology, creation was measured by the bricolage behaviors that are used to create something from nothing, which tend to follow adaptive strategies of low prediction. Discovery was aligned with the causation model of strategic planning, and imagination was measured by the effectuation behaviors of transformative strategies. The adaptive bricolage behaviors were mainly based on Baker and Nelson’s (2005: 363) classical definition of “making do by applying combinations of the resources at hand to new problems and opportunities.” The behaviors related to the discovery perspective are standard strategic planning behaviors, while the three counterintuitive anomalies of transformative effectuation shown in Table 2 (from “no planning,” to consider “means over goals” when making decisions, to “ignore the competition”) were based on Arend, Sarooghi, and Burkemper (2015: 643).

3.5 Data Collection Techniques and Analysis

Two research assistants and the author independently developed a full detailed case history that captured—using all the data at their disposal—the intricacies of the firm-founding process. Fifteen open-ended questions designed by Fisher (2012) were utilized to begin developing the case history. These questions are reported in Appendix (Table A1). Eisenhardt and Graebner (2007: 28) argue that semistructured interviews are a highly efficient way to gather rich empirical data, especially for phenomena of interest that are episodic and infrequent, such as the Osaka Group’s creative fusion concept. In addition to these interviews, data were collected from documents, observations (e.g., occasional dining experiences), and secondary sources, such as local newspapers, magazines, and company websites. The informants also provided news clippings and photographs.

Five rounds of semistructured interviews, which were each approximately six months apart, were performed between 2016 and 2018 to capture the decisions and actions of the Osaka Group’s entrepreneurs as they created and developed their new venture. These interviews were conducted with the three entrepreneurs in one of their restaurants. By conducting most of the interviews at one of the informants’ restaurants, the researcher was able to observe their work setting directly. These on-site visits enabled the researcher to observe normal operations and talk informally with the informants and their employees. Consistent with the work of Chiles et al. (2013: 284–286), cointerpreting and coconstructing meaning with the entrepreneurs played an active role in the second phase of the interview process. The informants were asked to retell parts of the Osaka Group’s story, but during the second phase they were asked to use entrepreneurial imagination as an interpretive lens. Given that the intention was not to lead the informants to agree with the theory, the entrepreneurs were explicitly asked, for example, whether the theoretical lens of imagination failed to resonate with any part of their venture’s story. When this was the case, the entrepreneurs were asked to aid the researcher to better understand their views, which encouraged them to engage in cointerpretations and coconstructions of meaning.

The coding scheme was developed using an iterative approach, and internal validity was ensured as new data were incorporated into the emerging categories. As suggested by Chiles et al. (2013: 289), when new data revealed inconsistencies among the existing categories, the coding scheme was modified to address these. This process was repeated until theoretical saturation was achieved. The fit between the data and a theory was assessed as strong if it was evident that the entrepreneurs’ answers (as captured by the case history) matched the entrepreneurial behaviors associated with a corresponding theory. This process entailed matching the patterns in the interview-based data to the entrepreneurial behaviors (adaptive bricolage, strategic planning, and transformative effectuation) associated with each theoretical stream (creation, discovery, and imagination), as reported in Tables 1 and 2.

If the data were clear and unlikely to be contested and if a strong fit between the data and the strategic behaviors associated with a particular theory was identified, the data were marked “AB,” “SP,” or “TE” (for adaptive bricolage, strategic planning, and transformative effectuation, respectively). Examples of “strong fits” between the interviews and entrepreneurial behaviors are reported in Table A1. A fit between the qualitative data in the case history and the behaviors associated with each theory provided evidence that a theory was relevant for explaining the emergence of the associated venture. In the other cases, if the evidence was not as strong, that is, if it required some interpretation or was not supported by multiple data sources, the data were marked “WD” (weak data). Moreover, in some cases, when it was impossible to infer from the data whether the answers of the entrepreneurs were aligned with a specific strategic behavior that is associated with one of the three theories, the outcome was marked “NE” (no evidence).

4.1 The Three Entrepreneurs

The three entrepreneurs had unique and intriguing entrepreneurial approaches. The narrative of chef Ciro Watanabe (CW) scored very high on the adaptive bricolage template (seven questions out of fifteen were coded as “AB”), which is typical of highly creative professions. Nikkei cuisine is adaptive by nature; it represents the fusion of two ancient cultures (Inka and Japanese). CW acknowledged many times that he was more than happy to adapt and integrate local ingredients that had hardly ever been used before in Peru or Japan (e.g., stone crabs or Florida lobsters). His answers to the question of whether he had stretched society’s expectations by bringing a new product or service to market were coded mostly in accord with the classical definition of bricolage, namely, “applying combinations of the resources at hand to new problems and opportunities” (Baker and Nelson 2005: 363). However, instead of “combinations,” he frequently used the term “synergies of Peruvian and Japanese” cuisine. Moreover, when asked how he created the first iteration of the venture’s product or service, CW answered, “By the time we opened the first Osaka-Santiago (in 2009), we already had an established Nikkei reputation (in Lima). Fortunately, for us, the people in Santiago had a good understanding of Peruvian food. For many years, Peruvian ‘nanas’ have been cooking in the kitchens of rich Chilean families.”

Extending this line of questioning, when asked how they would describe the early competitive advantage of their venture, their most repeated answer (mainly by CW) was that it was “authentically Peruvian.” CW pointed out that while Nikkei cuisine is found all over the world, only the brands exported from Peru are considered to represent authentic Nikkei cuisine. DLP, in contrast, argued in favor of copying and improving, mainly in the context of marketing principles (such as branding and design), when he was asked the following question: Where did the opportunity emerge from? Describe the opportunity emergence process. In DLP’s words, “Let’s do what Matsuei does—put the same Peruvian touches, slightly more flavor, and not so traditional—but let’s make a trendy restaurant. One that invites you to stay, where the service is spectacular; that makes you feel good, where you find beautiful architecture and good music, atmosphere, and design.” This discussion of competitive advantage revolved around industry and branding, which are the bases for the definition of the differentiation strategy measured in this study via the ongoing competitive analysis entrepreneurial behaviors of strategic planning that are reported in Table 2 (Table A2 reports a summary of the percentages of distribution, per entrepreneur, across the five coding categories).

Despite the researcher’s initial intuition that DLP, who had a more traditional business sense, would give answers that would be coded mostly in accord with the strategic planning (“SP”) template, the raw data revealed another story. More than two-thirds of DLP’s answers were distributed between “TE” and “SP” (the remaining inputs were coded as “AB” and “NE”). Instead of the typical “strategic planner,” DLP was better suited to the visionary entrepreneurial prototype that is based on strategic projections. According to Wiltbank et al. (2006: 990), a visionary emphasizes the construction of an organization and its environment by imagining future possibilities and proactively bringing them to fruition. This definition explains DLP’s vision of international growth. During our conversations, DLP rarely missed an opportunity to either discuss future Osaka Group restaurant openings in new and exciting cities or to move beyond the Osaka Group to share new ventures that were developing organically in Lima (e.g., a Japanese grill restaurant, an Asian fast-food chain, and a “regional street food” concept).

DH had a similar story, but he was slightly more influenced by the transformative effectuation measures. Indeed, DH’s coded answers were roughly divided as follows: more than half of the answers were coded as “TE” (eight out of fifteen questions), one-third of the answers were coded as “AB,” and the remaining answers were coded as “NE” and “SP.” The typical transformative effectuation behaviors of DH, which were mainly based on the “means over goals” principle, can be summarized by the following statement: “Despite the huge differences between the reopening of Osaka-Santiago (2018) and the [opening of the] first Osaka near the beach (2002 in Lima), we have always applied what we knew. First, we learned how to roll sushi; then, we rode the Nikkei wave all the way.” The idea of a formal business plan was ridiculous to DH. Once, responding to a follow-up question that asked if he was testing the menu for the future Miami location with multiple focus groups, his answer was a quick and definite “no.” Moreover, on October 13, 2017, when queried about early competitive advantages, DH stated the following: “All of our business decisions come from our gut feelings; we never use any formal business plans or market research. We also have good partners most of the time and hire great team members.” However, as mentioned above and reported in Tables A1 and A2, not all of DH’s answers were coded as “TE.” For example, when asked if the competitive advantage of the venture had changed over time, he answered [as an example], “We never open a restaurant in a country that already has a strong culinary history; for now, we cannot compete against the local cuisine in Madrid, Paris or Rome.” This answer was classified as “SP” even though it did not involve a formal document or spreadsheet.

DH’s answers to two questions demonstrate his controlling approach, which is a clear indication of “TE” behavior (Wiltbank et al. 2006): How would you describe the decision-making approach used in the early days of the venture? Did the decision-making process change over time? If so, how? According to DH, “At the beginning, we grew so fast that everything was chaotic. Some of our franchising experiences were not going smoothly since we had no control over the operation. Our foreign franchises were implementing their menus, which were quite different from the creative fusion in the restaurants we had control over … Our growth strategy is determined by not losing control over our product/service.” That is, “Since it is nearly impossible to franchise innovation-driven, high-quality daily service, we decided to open only one restaurant per year.” Exponential growth through franchising was out of the question. In any Japanese restaurant, implementing standard cost-reducing inventory procedures when using raw seafood as a key ingredient is extremely challenging. When asked whether their strategy development process had changed over time, and if so, how, DH stated the following on December 5, 2017: “First, we tried to grow with franchisees, charging a 5% royalty fee on total sales and a one-time fee of 80 thousand (USD). However, since it is nearly impossible to franchise the level of quality that took us to where we are right now, we decided to change the strategy. Santiago, Miami, Lima, and London are now partnerships, and each local partner provides local know-how on networks, markets, suppliers, labor, and taxes. Cash and culinary expertise are secondary. This is the ideal scenario to grow and to preserve the best experiences possible.”

Imagination helps explain the success of the Osaka Group’s Santiago de Chile restaurant, as measured by international culinary awards; this location has been more successful than the other South American locations, including the two Osaka Group restaurants in Lima. Notably, the Santiago restaurant is where CW worked. Moreover, Santiago de Chile offers stronger institutions than other cities in South America. However, this is not the whole story. Eventually, it became clear that Osaka-Santiago’s success was due to more than chef Watanabe’s innovative creations or Chile’s history of institutional successes: Osaka-Santiago had and has DH’s transformative effectuation imprint all over it, mainly in small but very important details, such as music and lighting. This was not evident to the researcher until the travel logs were analyzed, which showed that DH’s number of business trips to Santiago was almost double that of DLP’s. A serendipitous, nonbusiness-related reason (a typical trait of effectuation) for DH’s business trips to Santiago was his interest in snowboarding in the Chilean Andes.

4.2 Entrepreneurial Trilemma

Although inductive reasoning was mainly used to compare and contrast the case histories given by the three entrepreneurs in their responses to the fifteen questions involving the entrepreneurial behaviors of adaptive bricolage, strategic planning, and transformative effectuation, it was also necessary to use opportunistic abductive reasoning to discern the hidden information embedded in the data. Abduction theory is relevant only to the extent that, in contrast to observed patterns (e.g., entrepreneurial behaviors), it may serve as for “surfacing anomalies” that demand further explanation (Bamberger 2018: 3). Thus, while following the trail of evidence and narrowing the range of alternative explanations, creative imagination—which was hidden within the narrow bridge that links creation theory with imagination theory—resurfaced from the data as a plausible, missing element of entrepreneurship theory that is not easily explained by the extant theories of discovery, creation, or imagination (refer to Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Entrepreneurial trilemma.

Evidence from the data shows that when some behaviors are emphasized, others must be sacrificed, which is the logic of the entrepreneurial trilemma shown in Figure 1. Based on this trilemma, three bridging constructs surfaced from the data: (1) to imagine and discover (e.g., strategic projection), (2) to discover and create (e.g., planned emergence), and (3) to create and imagine (e.g., creative imagination). The notion of creative imagination effectively mirrors Thomas Edison’s words: “to invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk” (Chiles, Bluedorn, and Gupta 2007: 476). The first half of Edison’s statement applies to entrepreneurial imaginativeness, while the phrase “pile of junk” applies to adaptive bricolage entrepreneurial behaviors. Creative imagination serves not only as “the wellspring of the dynamism, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and indeterminacy” that characterizes the complex world of entrepreneurs but also enables the creation of novelty through forward-looking imagination, meaning that entrepreneurs can create opportunities through their expectations of an imagined future (Chiles et al. 2013: 278). Following Lachmann (1986) logic that entrepreneurs form plans based on their subjective knowledge and expectations and are thus oriented toward an unknowable future, Chiles, Bluedorn, and Gupta (2007) further argue that entrepreneurship is an inherently “creative” act; entrepreneurs must “imagine” possible futures and choose from a variety of subjective mental creations. Therefore, because individuals act on plans based on their subjective knowledge of the past and their expectations of the future, creative imagination is defined as the “creation of opportunities through human imagination directed toward an envisioned future” (Chiles, Bluedorn, and Gupta 2007: 473).

4.3 Conceptual Overlaps

Despite the conceptual overlaps between the three theories of entrepreneurial behavior, each of these concepts has been developed through and into its own literature stream; they have rarely been examined together. Accordingly, building upon the logic of collapsing the creative imagination edge that is applied in the trilemma and following Welter et al.’s (2016) bridging models of entrepreneurial behavior, Figure 2 is introduced to vividly illustrate the relationships between the constructs. Other models exist; indeed, planned emergence, strategic projection, and creative imagination do not represent the only ways to describe how an entrepreneur can create value. This constitutes a limitation of this study.

Figure 2:

Conceptual overlaps of entrepreneurial behaviors.

Similar to the “creative imagination” entrepreneurial construct bridge shown in Figures 1 and 2, several streams of research point to “planned emergence” or “planned adaptation” as a conceptual overlap between planning and adaptive strategic behaviors (Wiltbank et al. 2006: 986). Planned emergence focuses on predictive strategies that not only foster rapid adaptation but also, simultaneously, plan and develop systems that facilitate innovation and change (e.g., the evaluation and pursuit of emergent opportunities). Planned emergence strategies prepare ventures for major decisions as new, real-time information becomes available (Wiltbank et al. 2006: 986). In contrast, strategic projection reflects predictive efforts that support a particular vision and a consistency between communication and resource commitments (Rindova and Fombrun 1999; Wiltbank et al. 2006: 991).

5.1 Future Research and Limitations

Future research should further investigate the following questions: Are the overlaps, potentially, forms of necessary complementarity among the three theories of entrepreneurial behaviors, and if effectuation is essentially an idea with a sense of purpose (e.g., effectuation.org), do successful bricolage and even strategic planning require some level of effectuation? In a similar vein, future research could differentiate the behaviors that are nonpredictive from planned behaviors by aligning imagination with the “form” of the execution of actions while aligning creation with the “types” of actions. Using this conceptualization, adaptive bricolage (based on creation theory) would be analyzed from a qualitative dimension—perhaps using the “seven effective entrepreneurial actions in creation contexts” framework formulated by Alvarez and Barney (2007: 17)—while transformative effectuation (based on imagination theory) would thus be analyzed primarily from a quantitative dimension.

Furthermore, a significant limitation of studying imagination in an entrepreneurial context is that the entrepreneurs who are interviewed have to use their imaginations to answer questions about their past behaviors, which elicits memories and creates narratives of their stories and about their past thoughts. However, by analyzing imagination as the interplay between the mind’s role in the creation of everyday perception, which blends and unifies sense impressions with memories, and its equally important role in the conscious creation of images, as suggested by Thompson (2018a, 2018b), the validity of the data produced in this study could be subjective or even misrepresentative of actual entrepreneurial behaviors. Another methodological limitation stems from examining a complex phenomenon with positive and negative aspects by interviewing the same successful entrepreneurs who created it and asking them to recount what happened years ago (using Fisher’s questions). The problem with employing retrospective sensemaking and data narrativity is that recollections change over time, smoothing out the ups and downs of any process. These are limitations that are beyond the scope of this study, but they should be noted for future research.

5.2 Concluding Remarks

A comparative analysis of three entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial haute cuisine phenomenon, which was narrated and coconstructed by key players, was used to create a path for a third view of the entrepreneurial process through the notion of imagination. Entrepreneurial behaviors were associated with the three theories of entrepreneurship (creation, discovery, and imagination) to evaluate the following novel mapping: (1) creation is characterized by adaptive bricolage, (2) discovery is characterized by strategic planning, and (3) imagination is characterized by transformative effectuation (“is characterized by” does not presume causality or implication in either direction). Through abductive reasoning, creative imagination surfaced as a missing element and a bridging (between the bricolage behaviors of the adaptive strategies found in creation theory and the effectuation behaviors of the transformative strategies found in imagination theory) construct of a novel entrepreneurial trilemma (shown in Figure 1). Creative imagination is defined as the “creation of opportunities through human imagination directed toward an envisioned future” (Chiles, Bluedorn, and Gupta 2007: 473). The logic of the trilemma, which underlines the model’s edges rather than its vertices, implies that since some entrepreneurial behaviors are emphasized, others must be sacrificed. Furthermore, based on the logic of the trilemma and with theoretical grounding in Welter et al.’s (2016) bridging model, a new model of entrepreneurial behaviors that focuses on conceptual overlaps is introduced (shown in Figure 2) to visually demonstrate the relationships between the constructs and to reflect what practical actions entrepreneurs take. As a conceptual overlap, creative imagination supports the research of scholars such as Ludwig Lachmann and Todd Chiles rather than that of Alexander Kier and Jeffery McMullen, who tend to separate imaginativeness from creativity.