A train to New Orleans: Creatives, exaptation and community-inspired entrepreneurial action

Exaptation, the evolutionary process of originative change, underlies much of creativity and innovation, as skills and knowledge are adapted from serving one purpose to another. In conducting an inductive qualitative field study among 80 street creatives in New Orleans, our key insight is that street creatives learn in community-based gatherings and are able to take knowledge, skills, and traits to other contexts via an exaptation process to enhance their entrepreneurial prospects in the future. Creatives seek out accessible microcosms known for developing artistic, technical, or craft capacities such as community-based gatherings as destinations for their creative journeys. These locations become migration stops for nascent creatives who desire to evolve adaptations that can later be repurposed for more exploitative objectives. To date, researchers have primarily dedicated their efforts to studying the geographies settled by entrepreneurs as final destinations, and little attention has been devoted to the microcosms which creatives journey to as stops to initially develop themselves. Through our inductive field study, we build theory which highlights the value of these overlooked microcosms and the crucial role they play in the creative lifecycle.