Entrepreneurial imagining: How a small team of arts entrepreneurs created the world’s largest traveling carillon

Although imagination has been recognized as essential to entrepreneuring, the processes by which entrepreneurs imagine and generate novelty remain insufficiently understood. To begin addressing this oversight, we propose a rhizomatic process model of entrepreneurial imagining that comprises five elements: experiencing, early creating, reaching an impasse and gestating, (re)creating and evaluating imagined futures, and choosing and enterprising. To generate this dynamic process model, we undertook an abductive, 25-month case study, guided by enactive research, to investigate how a small team of arts entrepreneurs created the world’s largest traveling carillon. Our primary contribution is to offer new theoretical insights into entrepreneurial imagining as a complex, situated, relational performance that unfolds through conscious and unconscious, self-reflective and embodied processes.