entrepreneurship as creativity - monika kostera · entrepreneurship as creativity . entrepreneurial...
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Entrepreneurship as Creativity
Entrepreneurial Creativity According to Bengt Johannisson (2005):
• Most of us are creative, entrepreneurs have not unlearned how to,
• Entrepreneurs create in a social medium (by organizing)
• Active reality construction, • Looking for free space, avoiding of control, • Passion and transcendence, crossing of
boundaries, stereotypes, certainties, • Vision (imagination) and action (pratice) • Creating and acquiring resources
Entrepreneurship
Stories in Entrepreneurship
„Entrepreneurship is a form of co-authorship in the form of collective stories, dramatic scripts, generative metaphors and concurring discourses.”
Steyaert, 2004
Entrepreneurship
Narratives and stories
• Basic structure of our reality (Martin Heidegger, David Carr) or a way of structuring our experience (Hayden White, Anthony Giddens).
• A tool for sensemaking, learning, and communication
• We operate under narrative rationality. Narratives guide our actions.
Stories
• Have a temporal extension and causal cohesion (events follow each other and are related)
• Have a limited scope and definable structure (beginning, middle, end), i.e. a plot.
David Tonge, the Yarnsmith
of Norwich
Entrepreneurship
What makes a story?
• It has a beginning and an ending
• A particular incident is related
• There is characterization
• There is a plot
• There may be a sub-story (or many sub-stories)
Entrepreneurship
Storytelling
Good leaders throughout history have relied on stories to inspire followers
Storytelling occurs in all human cultures
It takes precedence on ritual occasions
Aristotle argued that stories make it possible for us to share our world
When we tell stories we contribute to a collective memory retained in cultural myths
Myths provide templates for histories, novels, films and other modern cultural forms
Entrepreneurship
Understand the Context
• On an Athi River highway: "TAKE NOTICE: When this sign is under water, this road is impassable.„
• Airline ticket office, Copenhagen: "We take your bags and send them in all directions.„
• American slogan for Salem cigarettes: "Salem - Feeling Free,". When translated for marketing in the Japanese market, it means, "When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty"
Machine Translators Context-less!
Entrepreneurship
...and often meaning-less... Stories contextualize knowledge!
Entrepreneurship
The E-Tale
Entrepreneurs use stories for many purposes:
to illustrate their points
to convey their corporate or personal history
to celebrate acts of courage
to communicate identity
to transmit tacit knowledge
Entrepreneurship
Tacit vs. Explicit Knowledge Michael Polanyi (1966)
Explicit Knowledge
• Systematic
• Mental
• Spelled out and codified (in words and numbers)
• Easy to transmit
Tacit Knowledge
• Personal
• Involves body and mind
• Difficult to describe
• Time-consuming to transmit
Entrepreneurship
Stories
• Always allow multiple interpretations (and reintepretations and later dates), even though they are often told or written with a specific moral (or point) in mind.
Learning Entrepreneurship
...from stories the entrepreneurs tell...
Entrepreneurship
Learning from the E-Tale
E-tales are not definitions but narratives • „closer to life/ground, to relations, to the social of entrepreneurship and to the entrepreneurial of the Social” • „contextualized and practice-oriented descriptions” (Chris Steyaert & Daniel Hjorth, 2006)
Entrepreneurship
Telling stories
• Remember why you are telling the story
• Choose the most appropriate form
• Embellish or simplify the narrative based on your rhetorical needs