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

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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

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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)

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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

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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!

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...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

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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

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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