Understanding Imagination in Entrepreneurship

Abstract Using interviews to explore the role imagination plays in the South American Nikkei phenomenon (a fusion of Japanese haute cuisine with Peruvian ingredients) and employing the alternate templates research strategy to analytically compare three entrepreneurial behaviors (adaptive bricolage, strategic planning, and transformative effectuation), this case study found that the current theoretical boundary conditions are insufficient to separate the three archetypes. Therefore, based on data, new concepts are proposed to explain entrepreneurial behaviors where they overlap (e.g., creative imagination as a bridging construct of the entrepreneurial process). A novel entrepreneurial trilemma and a behavioral model focused on the conceptual overlaps are introduced to frame the new concepts and to visually depict the relationships between them.