Sources of Entrepreneurial Courage and Imagination: Three Perspectives, Three Contexts

The strategy literature has been insightful in specifying the requirements for rents under uncertainty, but has concentrated less on how to meet those requirements. We argue that courage and imagination are essential drivers of such rents and that several streams in the entrepreneurship literature enlighten us as to the sources of those drivers: these are the perspectives of effectuation, entrepreneurial orientation, and strategic entrepreneurship. Although these perspectives apply to multiple organizational contexts, we suggest that their relevance to the sources of courage and imagination is especially acute in simple start–ups, dynamic high–tech innovators, and complex bureaucracies, respectively. Moreover, we call attention to other possible sources of entrepreneurial courage and imagination that have been underemphasized in the literature.