Curiosity and curious search in Entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurship research rarely explores and explains how people approach ambiguity differently as they combine knowledge during the entrepreneurial journey. In this paper we introduce curiosity as a source of intrinsic motivation that addresses this shortcoming. We find that the full range of curiosity-driven entrepreneurial behaviour is not well-described by terminology found within the curiosity literature, such as ‘specific curiosity’ or ‘diversive curiosity’, which have characterized curiosity according to excessively ‘configurational’ mixes of features. For that reason, we develop a new classification system based on behaviour. By focusing on three dimensions – the approach towards ambiguity, emotional valence, and experimentation versus theorization – we develop a unique 3 × 2 typology of ‘curious search’. The six forms of curious search – tweaking and sleuthing (what we call ‘clarifying’ types of curious search), spelunking and stargazing (‘adventuresome’ types), and fiddling and wool-gathering (‘bored’ types) – are described and illustrated in a variety of entrepreneurship situations, and are also shown to apply to a variety of existing entrepreneurship research topics, especially entrepreneurial imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• Curiosity
• epistemic emotion
• ambiguity
• exploration
• alertness
• boredom
• adventure
• problem-solving

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. We also thank William B. Gartner, Dan Hsu, Jackson Nickerson, and Todd Zenger for their valuable and encouraging comments during prior drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Our typology expands but also contrasts with work from other researchers working in this kind of topic. Jeraj and Antoncic (2013) develop a construct of ‘entrepreneurial curiosity’ and show that it can be an independent construct dimension in relation to other types of curiosity. While their empirically-driven conceptualization of ‘entrepreneurial curiosity’ definitively includes ‘flow’ and mere ‘interest’, we don’t believe that the earliest stages of entrepreneurship – when entrepreneurial curiosity is arguably most salient – need require either of those. More recently, Arikan et al. (2020) separately suggest that an ‘entrepreneurial curiosity’ explains why entrepreneurs begin the process of forming an opportunity under conditions of Knightian uncertainty. We believe that we are expanding on both those pieces of research. Probably most notably, our framework for curious search welcomes perceptual or sensory curiosity as much as epistemic curiosity (cf. Arikan, Arikan, and Koparan 2020).

2. This notion is described well by Foss and Foss (2008, 193), who remark that ‘entrepreneurs may only be able to identify some elements of an opportunity, so they need to invoke imagination and search for and process information in order to more fully identify and evaluate the opportunity’.

3. Ahuja and Morris Lampert’s (2001) framework would be an excellent starting point for examining the organizational management of curiosity.

4. We do also wish to stress a distinction between curiosity and ‘activity for activity’s sake’. The former involves a genuine desire to learn, explore, or understand something new, thus driven by a thirst for knowledge. On the other hand, the latter entails engaging in tasks or actions, driven merely by a need to appear busy or to conform to societal expectations.

5. Such hypotheses, according to our notion of curious search, are not at all necessarily associated with a priori estimates of utility or fitness.

6. Our concept of ‘sleuthing’ is not unlike Weinberger et al’.s (2018) use of the term ‘pondering’. We prefer the term ‘sleuthing’ simply because it more strongly connotes an aim of solving a (mysterious) problem.

7. The notion of curiosity figures in well with a radical subjectivist approach to entrepreneurship, where entrepreneurs perpetually generate novelty by combining and continually recombining capital resources over potentially wide timeframes, via nonoptimal choices based on limited knowledge, imperfect foresight, and arational, unstable expectations (see T. H. Chiles et al. 2010 for a wonderful review of such radical Austrian approach).

8. In describing the virtuous cycle of discovery and creation of entrepreneurial opportunities, Zahra (2008, 244) does explicitly suggest that corporate entrepreneurs may be ‘driven by curiosity’.

9. Whereas McMullen and Kier (2017) and Kier and McMullen (2018, 2020) treat imagination as an ability, Elias and colleagues treat imagination more as a process or its associated instantiations. We do not see major conflicts in these two different systems of terminology, given that a variety of other terms are also often used to refer to both ability and process (e.g. ‘communication’, ‘problem-solving’). The context can eventually determine how the word should be interpreted. We see our concept of ‘curious search’ fitting well with both usages.