Creative intelligence is needed in order to think flexiblyand to be ahead of the pack rather than merely with it.

here are eight basic kinds of new ideas, entrepreneurial orotherwise

reative thinkers defy the crowd,seeing alternative ways of defining and solving problems that others often do not see

Creative intelligence is used to generate ideas that are novel, high in quality, andappropriate to the task one faces.

Tobe effective on the job, however, requires a third kind of skill beyond the analytical (IQ-based) and the practical.

People (such as my own son!)who wish to be entrepreneurs and form their own business may find school a distraction fromwhat interests and matters most to them.

Practicalskills are necessary to apply these analytical tools correctly to the problems really facing oneon the job

there is some kind of construct of practical intelligencethat is distinct from the kind of academic intelligence

successful intelligence, not just a subset ofits components (analytical, practical, and creative abilities), is needed for entrepreneurialsuccess

Far from being an ideal career choice, possessing and capitalizing on a creative ability may be the most obvious means of facilitating life choices.

Contemporary economic ideologies result in attributing the creative industries with particular characteristics from the outside, not always recognized by creative individuals themselves, forming tensions between the individuals operating within the creative sectors and those support structures nominally established to aid their evolution.

Their opportunity is not responding to what is “out there” but concretizing what is “in here” in their creative hearts and minds.

Pursuing entrepreneurial activity, far from being a response to an external encouragement provided by government, is more likely to represent a mark of self-determination and self-expression. Discourses elevating the importance and the identity of “the entrepreneur” are seen as irrelevant at bes

Market logics are understood and incorporated into solutions and, in fact, are seen to be part of the creative process

Creative industry entrepreneurs mediate the relationship between being creative and being an entrepreneur: in their narrative, the creative is often elevated above the business emphasis, but in their behaviors they demonstrate enactment of entrepreneurial actions (planning, strategy, etc.).

there is a scale of creativity

Idealization of the entrepreneur by powerful external stakeholders contrasts with the intimate experience of the people concerned

Lisa’s lived experience of creativity is a “feeling of...the satisfaction of knowing that you’re going about the job the right way...” and she is critical of the image of the agonized artist, “I’m very skeptical about these ‘creative impulses’.” For Lisa, creativity is not “a solitary activity”, something that she separates herself from the world to pursue, and is in some way at the mercy of being struck by. Rather, it is a reaction to a problem, “...a conversation...as much as anything.”

I find that with creatives, they’re very afraid to take chances...they’re willing to keep it in a box somewhere, not willing to push it, they lack in confidence.”

hings can be labelled and named without being truly understood

creative work “is extremely difficult and takes a huge amount of energy and motivation” and it can be difficult to sustain this energy

Designers do not take much risk, and are, on the whole, not innovative, they are “basically coming up with the same solutions, one might be better than the other, but there’s nothing innovative about what one person is doing...they do good or less good work...but I wouldn’t equate that to innovation at all.”

Carrying out creative work provides a sense of fulfillment.

“some of the most creative people I know don’t work in the creative industries.” She insists that creativity is about problem-solving and seeing beyond “the surface of things” suggesting that she believes that it is a feature of all human endeavor.

The quest for self-sufficiency

“corporate” and “creative” are antithetical.

Creative industry entrepreneurs draw on their creative expertise within a domain and build entrepreneurial possibilities around this expertise

“An entrepreneur is someone who from the outset has a plan.”

I think it’s about mindset”, and “...when I think creative person, I think problem solver...

ll of these businesses as creative and they represent a particular instance of “creative intensity”

Peter regards his life as a creative entrepreneur as a collage of all the experiences he has had in life, both professionally and personally, “these jigsaw pieces I saw, I picked up along the way

Peter claims that he is “not artistic in any way”, but identifies strongly with showing specific types of creative behaviors

Opportunities are simply there, and the fact that others don’t see them is because they “mightn’t be looking for the same thing.” Lisa believes that most people are looking for opportunities and “constantly scanning a particular horizon” but different people have different “filters” and “notice certain things.” One person might notice one thing and another a different thing, and some people then “don’t act.

The protagonist of this research, the creative industries entrepreneur, does not have a standard profile. She specializes within specific domains but also operates across domains inside and outside the creative industries; she may run a solitary enterprise from remote, rural hinterlands far away from the world, or lead a large organization in a frenetic urban center. The type of work she engages in can involve detailed, intimate crafting but also strategic and collaborative negotiations. She is firmly situated within a creative world but demonstrates incisive business acumen

“entrepreneurs and consumers may be able to recognize an opportunity to produce new products or services once it is created, but be unable to anticipate such an opportunity before it is created

The first interview involved questions about the lived experience of being a creative individual and being an entrepreneur, and the second interview was an exploration of how constructs such as “the creative industries” were understood and embraced.

he individual account should be heard

Entrepreneurs may demonstrate creativity not only in their own creative output, but by their ability to identify resources needed to complete work

“total arbitrariness” characterizes some entrepreneurial discovery

The “alert” entrepreneur (Kirzner, 1973) uses knowledge to discover opportunities

Entrepreneurs do not exist in a world where opportunities are equally obvious to all (Kirzner, 1973). Some people are “alert” to opportunities while others are not.

The opportunity does not exist separate to the entrepreneur. Discovered opportunities come about due to “exogenous shocks” in the industry or market (Alvarez and Barney, 2007): the entrepreneur only reacts to such shocks. Such a “shock” creates a new set of circumstances (or information) that the entrepreneur can exploit before others do.

Individuals have different stocks of knowledge based on their life experiences and each person’s prior knowledge creates a “knowledge corridor” that allows them to recognize certain opportunities but not others (Venkataraman, 1997 in Shane 2000, p. 452). The knowledge corridor for individuals are personal, socially constructed phenomena and creative entrepreneurs display differences in knowledge depth and quantity not only with other entrepreneurs, but with each other.

he process of opportunity identification has a strong relationship with creativity and with prior knowledge of the entrepreneur

The audience for a creative work responds emotionally, making it difficult to successfully locate the “cultural product within the accepted norms of economic practice”

Creative individuals are challenged to create products and services that are different enough, but not too different, to be accepted within the domain

the market is unknown prior to production of creative goods

The person, as the third element in the model, displays intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (Amabile, 1996). The extent to which creative individuals respond to intrinsic motivators (satisfaction, fulfilment) doing things for which they expect “neither fame nor fortune” (Csikszentmihalyi, 2004) as opposed to extrinsic motivations such as market demands, financial reward and domain recognition (Fletcher, 2006) is a matter of choice and personal agency.

The need for autonomy (Penaluna and Penaluna, 2011), the attitude to risk (Taylor, 2011) and traits of curiosity, tenacity, and collaboration of creative people (Rabideau, 2015), also commonly cited as entrepreneurial characteristics

Creative people display contrasting qualities: they are considered to be prolific and at the center of a set of activities (Townley and Beech, 2010) but also marginal and capable of drawing inspiration from across social groups

creativity functions within social systems. Creativity occurs at the intersection of the domain, the field, and the person

The creative act whereby “that which is unknown, or known in another way, becomes translated into an image to be re-presented to itself” (Townley and Beech, 2010, p. 12) must be stripped of its mystery if it is to become operationalized within organizational settings.

Creative work encompasses the ethereal and the mundane, the autotelic, suspended state of the creative act (Csikzentmihalyi, 1996) and the prosaic view of creative work in which “works of art can be made in an orderly, rational and manageable manner”

entrepreneurship can be considered to be creative in itself, as “entrepreneurial decisions are creative decisions”

Different levels of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can be traced to different sectors within the creative industries

Entrepreneurs construct meaning from experience; the current study attempts to understand and interpret this meaning.

As the creative industry entrepreneur absorbs ever more experience, their own social reality and the meaning they take from their lived experience is modified: the phenomenon is not static.

creative industry entrepreneurs do not align themselves with traditional entrepreneurship discourses. The need to express their creativity through products, experiences, and services is balanced against the need to generate income and varying strategies are employed to do so.

I offer three accounts of creative entrepreneurship

This article aims to examine the experiences of the creative individual in the context of the broader “entrepreneurial society”

This study seeks to contribute to an understanding of the life of the creative industries entrepreneur and is underpinned by a social constructionist philosophy

Discourses surrounding creativity separate the creative person from the mainstream and present her as an interesting and slightly mysterious object of study (

an entrepreneur in the creative industries

A fine-grained analysis of the lives of creative industry entrepreneurs goes some way to achieving an understanding of individuals from the inside.

Expressing herself creatively is more than a job

nowledge bases based around symbols, rules, and notation systems which allow things to be understood

“I wouldn’t call myself an entrepreneur: I’m simply working for myself.”

entrepreneurs can be regarded as the “connective tissue” between creativity and business (

Creative ideas must be tradable

Peter differentiates between achievement and recognition, suggesting that the achievement is important, but the recognition of that achievement, less so

To be financially successful could decrease the reputation of such an artist, as it can be seen as an indication of their work having a poor, people-pleasing quality and a lack of artistic innovativeness and uniqueness. Hence, if they interpret entrepreneurship in the old-fashioned, dollar-greedy way they will not wish to label themselves cultural entrepreneurs.

two overarching uses of the cultural entrepreneurship concept:

societal change through the promotion of cultural objects and subjects

We define this process as cultural entrepreneurship

we propose that stories function to identify and legitimate new ventures,

Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Francis Bacon3, and Isaac Newton as examples of cultural entrepreneurs.

the dynamic development of intangible cultural features such as symbols, myths, languages, beliefs, values, norms, rituals, and attitudes

The quadruple bottom line of cultural entrepreneurship

the cultural entrepreneur as an agent for “1) changing people's understanding of what is possible (changing frame of reference),

Culture is then a kind of ideological and cognitive frame of all local economic sectors.

the automotive industry guru Henry Ford. Businessmen like Swift or Ford, because they undertook creative action that went beyond what was known or accepted at their time, had no choice but to draw their ideas and strategies from the deep sources of culture and value in which they were immersed.

It is also culturally specific, an example of "local knowledge," and "common sense," which differ, sometimes radically, across societies.

they may not be employed directly or indirectly in the cultural industries per se, but they continue to produce cultural goods with or without pay... As aspiring creative workers often combine jobs, this feature leads to a slash-mark bisecting their working identity: café worker/ songwriter, courier/drummer, color consultant/ painter, administrator/jewelry designer, and so on

for a small number of individuals, the beliefs of others are not given but can be changed. I shall refer to those people as cultural entrepreneur

changing people's motivation for taking part in economic development

t means being multi-skilled in hand work, design work, publicity and promotions, management and business and having some idea of manufacturing, as well as being in possession of creative vision, imagination

Table 1 Taxonomy of arts entrepreneurship components

Occasionally entrepreneurs really open up supposedly settled matters, calling into question interpretations that define products or technologies

The alternative is to use the word “cultural” as an adjective attached to the good or service that the entrepreneur provides.

artists as multiple jobholders who resemble entrepreneurs

they have found very little in the literature when it comes to definitions of the term “arts entrepreneurship.

Cultural entrepreneurs are cultural because they are about the cultural.

a primary “tension” is “commercialization versus culture (authenticity)

The economics has to be an instrument for them in order to realize cultural values... To be clear, we are working on a moral picture here and try to figure out what makes a good cultural entrepreneur. Someone who sees in cultural trade a way of adding profit becomes suspect as culture is his instrument and not his mission. He is rather a businessman. That does not make him a bad character but he is miscast as a cultural entrepreneur.

ttempt to define a cultural entrepreneur: “An individual who identifies an opportunity and acts upon it in order to create social, cultural, or economic value."

here is not one totalitarian culture industry—there are many “cultural industries.” Each culture, defined anthropologically, has its cultural industries. The same goes for each art form and each way of media communication.

Cultural entrepreneurs may, of course, have a focus on financial revenues. The economic value is always one part of their calculation. For some, maximum profit is the only objective. However, for most artists, earning money is most likely only one of several goals.

Those who wrote in English before the late nineteenth century mostly used the word “civilization” and its derivatives to describe the cultivated society.

we are dealing with a word that depicts the transformation of an object or a subject from one state to another. Cicero (146-43 BC) turned to agriculture to clarify how the human soul must be cultivated to a mature state, just like the seed grows to become adulta fructus.

Many entrepreneurs are identified by others as more “industrious” than the common person.

the anthropologist’s definition of culture as part of: Institutions [that] are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). “Culture” is not static—it changes over time.

Horkheimer and Adorno's claim was that the Kulturindustrie produces the opposite of what they labeled “authentic culture." By this they meant culture that is a means in itself and culture that fosters human imagination in a different way than the culture industry does. The authentic culture, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, leaves room for independent thought. The clash results in a “sell-out of culture," in which the true meaning of culture is replaced by “well-calculated stupidities of amusement”

we now identify a wide range of objects for which the leverage from a lower state to a higher one can be the concern of an entrepreneur. Now we also see the entrepreneur as someone who could be equally or more interested in some kind of social change.

cultural entrepreneurship is now radically different in the new long-tail economy, which is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream bestsellers at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

We expect to find cultural entrepreneurs in cultural industries.

This chapter was eliminated by Schumpeter in the second edition 20 years later. Swedberg (2006) claims “that when Schumpeter wrote the first edition he was a very young and enormously ambitious economist in Europe who wanted to take the academic world by storm; when he prepared the [English] translation in the 1930s he was a tenured professor at Harvard and had developed a much better sense for what mainstream economics was about—and also what it demanded of its practitioners if they wanted to remain in the mainstream.

Whereas the passive artist works statically and non-entrepreneurially with artistic adaptations according to the cultural zeitgeist, the dynamic cultural entrepreneur creates more radical artistic development.

ultural entrepreneurs can be either “social” or “artistic” or a combination of the two. It all depends on what we accept as included in the “culture” concept.

Entrepreneur

“take things from one state to another” meaning of the word entrepreneurship

The term “cultural entrepreneurship” has been increasingly used during the new millennium, mirroring the rapidly growing importance of the “quaternary sector of the economy,” i.e. knowledge-based industries, including culture. It seems to be used mostly in connection with “the cultural industries,” a term that is used for production and services related to both commercial mass culture and the fine arts

The true artist, in other words, should presumably be conceptualized as an entre-preneur; and as the economic entrepreneur has his imitators and followers, so does the artist. Both the artist and the entrepreneur are dynamic, active, and energetic and show leadership qualities, while their followers are passive and static and accept the way things are.

'cultural entrepreneur' is used here as a synecdoche for the (mostly) young neo-bohemian person operating in freelance mode at the interstices of the flexible labor market (within and without the creative industries) and self-driven cultural production.

transcendental qualities that are impossible to describe and thus impossible to discuss and refute.

ccording to Schumpeter the innovative entrepreneur creates a new good or service. Others learn from it,

undertakers as persons who by “the natural selection of the fittest [were] to undertake, to organize, and to manage,”

This kind of, more or less, necessity-driven and, perhaps, involuntary cultural entrepreneurship executed by cultural workers who only reluctantly identify themselves as entrepreneurs is in many countries encouraged by both cultural and labor-market public authorities.

This world is tired of grand solutions. It is tired of people that know exactly what has to be done

Paradoxically, perhaps, a final lesson of these storias for us is that it is high time we turned the lens round on ourselves. For the underlying truth is that we have asked questions here of our own understanding of entrepreneurship, and have been found wanting.

Our method of microstoria attempts to undermine the hegemonic postcolonial conception of the term ‘entrepreneur’. Through approaching the less obvious characters in the prevailing entrepreneur tale, we are bringing forward alternative narratives upon which to discuss entrepre-neurship

it is precisely our loud approaches to entrepreneurship, made in the name of progress, which are killing so much of life around us.

personal stories of struggle seem therefore not to be exceptional to people

recognizing the idea of the barefoot entrepreneur as the other, as a subaltern voice

We want to emphasize instead the vulnerability that exists among these barefoot entrepre-neurs—but also a deep sense of strength. It is their lives that are at stake everyday, where the lack of protection, care and freedom, and minimum subsistence, push them to act and enact their lives on a survival basis

mere caricature (see Pralahad, 2005) in which our barefoot entrepreneurs are depicted as superbly creative entrepreneurs, resilient and value-conscious consumers

entrepreneurship driven by a divine spirit which ignites a hope for a better life for this person and his family

The storias we have shared here do not seek to provide a romanticized view of poor entrepre-neurs

barefoot entrepreneurs reflect stories and practices that contain a plethora of meaning, values and relationships which question the prominent view of the entre-preneur.

the embroidering of garments or the creation of small sculptures made from anything disposable

There is a flux, a flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1992) to things, which the barefoot entrepreneur has to ride, just as any artist or creative in their work.

we see venture creation around crafting or other art forms

barefoot entrepreneurs because they have no other option but to create something for themselves out of the void that they exist in. Each person has different reasons for doing so; how-ever, their reasons are often linked to the community, and the will to help both themselves, and also others around them to alleviate some of their problems.

Children who are regarded without knowledge and the skills to generate ‘wealth’ are paradoxi-cally able in the urban hostile context of their existence to develop the necessary skills to create new business opportunities that sustain their existence when protection by family and state does not exist. Clearly Critical Entrepreneurship Studies (CES) needs to include taking account of such ‘other’ forms of entrepreneurship, especially the role of children in the construction of subsistence entrepreneurship

everyone needs to become a mosquito

we see a very collective form of social creativity in practice. The ‘boundaries’ being crossed are those of an organizational, hierarchical, industrial nature. The workers worked as mosquitoes, as a single joint cloud, contributing to their survival like the shoal of sardines under attack from shark and catapulting the business ahead

Their work is also collective. The cartonero co-create the ‘opportunities’ that are invisible to others, in and through their social creativity. In doing so, their activities go beyond the category of ‘necessity’ entrepreneurship (Acs, 2006), all too easily seen as the poor relation of ‘opportunity’ led entrepreneurship.

driven out, looked down upon and yet valued; the scarcity of resources, the necessity for ‘bootstrap’ or ‘parsimonious’ approaches (McGrath, 1997) to entrepreneurship and the need for bricolage—all are characteristic of entrepreneurship as widely discussed, and yet they speak to us in new ways about the possibility of an ‘altermodern’ (Bourriaud, 2009b) society characterized by fragmentation and hybridization.

viatorize1

The everydayness of their creative practice, the sense in which they trade in original and innovative ways to make a living—this is to act entrepreneurially. They embody the ‘entrepreneuring’ spirit

entrepreneurship is ‘a way of talking, a lan-guage used by people that produces power relations, and ... these power relations may involve problems’

begging appears as the antithesis of the mercurial business entrepreneur that is supposed to bring economic modernization, capital and progress to the city. Stigmatized and labelled as a dan-ger to progress, beggars negotiate their own ways of interpreting the economic, their space and their business activities

They may not succeed in creat-ing consuming organizations, but every day is a ‘new venture’

the discourse of entrepreneurship is not just about ‘massive successes’, but about ‘struggle, stress, debt and failure’

microstorias do not form a unitary discourse, a unique and grand history, but instead unfold the unconventional, the forgot-ten and the improper

Their barefoot microstoria is of a struggle and of risk.

we did not plan specific questions upon which to interrogate their ‘entrepreneurship’ or capacity for creativity. Theirs was a language of deprivation and exclusion; the one our microstorias wanted to raise. That is, before we intervene with our translations and analytical frameworks, we wanted to hear in their own language what they went through as ‘barefoot entrepreneurs’ and in this way avoid the obses-sive attempt to impose (colonialist) representations that define who they are and what they do.

There is also an enduring belief in the entrepreneur’s power to have a positive effect on others (see Arndt, 1983 for more on the so-called ‘trickle down myth’). This view of entrepreneurship puts emphasis on an economic system that values success as part of the ‘creation’ of business, at the expense of individuals and communities who are marginalized or excluded from the discourse

We met these people in the streets. The streets of these cities are where most of the excluded members of society make their trade in informal and disorganized ways (Burrell, 1997). There they beg, collect rubbish, dance or play music, sell in small kiosks, whatever they have, in order to make a living. We approached them in the streets and engaged with them in the movement and moment of our street encounter that brought a fluid conversation about their and our existence

our main criteria for constructing our microstorias of barefoot entrepreneurs, accept-ing the limitations and moral paradoxes (Geertz, 1968) when researching and analysing the other, was to approach only people who have been disfranchised and who operate at the mar-gins of society. That is, people who are ignored or overlooked by mainstream institutions and therefore do not receive any state or (inter)national support for their minimum survival and existence; those who have to carve their own living out of poverty; those who do not have the freedom to be the person that ‘they are able to be’

we attempted to de-colonize ‘the entrepreneur’

though our focus on the marginal, the excluded and the ‘barefoot entrepreneur’ inevita-bly calls for analytical separation between us and the ‘other’, we write this article in the firm belief that we are part of something that we need to transform together. Our universal commonality is an axiological principle of being ‘human’.

abandon this economic utopia that exploits nature and the poor for a more creative and organic integration and interdependence (of communities and peo-ples). This reflects, for him, a matter of bringing the ‘invisible’ (organizational) sectors into the forefront of life and of letting them, finally, have their say and ‘do their thing’

‘to speak of labour is to speak of the already enfranchised’ (p. 79). Hence to speak of the entrepreneur, is to speak of individuals who have already been given, or born into a state of pos-sibility and enfranchisement

the conventional knowledge we apply to understanding the economy of places and spaces in poverty are entirely meaningless.

moving to an economic system that serves the people rather than people serving the economy

Currently the discourse of the entrepreneur is driven with values that promote a great [white] man narrative of progression and economic achievement via ‘creative destruction’ or business innovation in the omnipresent market

the entrepreneur is defined as an individual who takes on certain tasks based solely on a perception of market oppor-tunities and how to exploit them

the Canadian aboriginal approach to economic development is predominantly collective, centred on the community or ‘nation’ for the purposes of ending dependency through economic self-sufficiency, controlling activities on tradi-tional lands, improving socio-economic circumstances, strengthening traditional culture, values and languages (and reflecting the same in development activities). These studies also question the postcoloniality of the ‘entrepreneur’ discourse and the economy of dependency that it creates (Khan et al., 2007). For example, Frederick and Foley (2006) maintain that colonial and postcolo-nial [entrepreneur] practices deprive indigenous communities of their land, culture and their basic human rights.

lives, like Imin’s, do speak of experiences and narratives that present a sig-nificantly different, and arguably no less legitimate story (Boje, 2008) to the one generally employed to define, describe or analyse ‘the entrepreneur’ (e.g. Palomino, 2003). Imin’s life does not provide a grand narrative of successful business, growth or innovation (e.g. Peredo, 2003). Imin’s life does not contribute to what Weiskopf and Steyaert (2009) describe as the holy trinity of the entrepreneur—the strong entrepreneurial figure, a neo-positivist tradition of research and the belief of optimistic policy-making that is grounded in the discourse of neolib-eral economic success. Imin’s life does not embed the myth of noble armoured knight entrepre-neurs (Sørensen, 2008). But his life does reflect distinctively different and no less valuable experiences and stories that have a bearing on our understanding of entrepreneurship

The mainstream discourse of entrepreneurship imposes an ideological and hegemonic reading that defines entrepreneurial behaviour and the enterprise economy

In microstoria we found a method that breaks with the hegemonic power of grand narratives (theories), such as those economic theories that have come to ‘represent’ entrepreneurship

the sublime

solidar-ity rather than competition informs relationships.

we approach our study of the barefoot entrepreneurs by employing ‘microstoria’ as a method (Ginzburg, 1993). Microstoria precisely addresses Max-Neef’s concerns about the representation of the poor by engaging with stories of little people, i.e. indigenous, peasants, minorities, poor, marginal and so forth

two great attributes that the mosquito cloud has: first, it sticks together and second, it has no chief mosquito, therefore no one can behead the cloud

we concentrate on those everyday entrepreneur[ial] stories that populate the mar-gins of our societies; those that belong to the disenfranchised and dislocated voices of the ‘barefoot entrepreneurs’.

dominant economic theory assigns no value to tasks carried out at subsistence and domestic levels. In other words, such (economic) theory is unable to embrace the poorer sectors of the world

the entrepreneur is defined within an economic system that legitimizes values, actions and identities that do not reflect life among poor or neglected communi-ties in the developing world or the poor south

We are emboldened to think again about ‘who is the entrepreneur?

collecting stories of people who otherwise will be left out

survival tactics, self-reliance and creative practices (see De Certeau, 1988) reflect the more mundane (Rehn and Taalas, 2004) everydayness of the entrepreneur

the ‘everydayness’ (Steyaert and Katz, 2004) of entrepreneuring that takes place at the margins of our societies

‘the word entrepreneur has no meaning’ (p. 85). The entrepreneur emerges as a fairy tale character, a mythological role.

The other side of the coin, however, is the riskthat people who have become the entrepreneurs of their own lives willsuffer alienation rather than self-fulfilment

the rise of impassioned entrepreneurship becomes a vehicleto imbue professional life with meaning. Connecting passions that linkprivate and professional lives help people gain emotional and culturalcompetencie

Necessary skills includefast adaptation, permanent change, mental and physical flexibility

The inducement to manage and transform one's self and/or tribeinto an entrepreneurial business producing and selling emotional la-bour, such as intimate videos, has a substantial effect on entrepreneurs'psyche

Whether this involves a person's work, play, or love life, they mustact like a superhero. The quest is driven by the unfettered desire to existand develop one's own identity (

The danger to which the autopreneur is exposed is an element thatcomplements the others presented in this article and helps define aframework within which the unconventional entrepreneurship is placed(see Fig. 1).

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of liquid times (Scharff,2016), a form of governmentality in people's lives where they become“entrepreneurs of themselves

today it is the entrepreneurwho represents neoliberal alienation

It is difficult in today's society toescape alienation

For most people today, unconventional entrepreneurship representsabsolute emancipation, allowing the perfect combination of privatepassion and professional success. Emancipation is usually defined as theprocess of being liberated from constraints that can be physical, in-tellectual, moral, or spiritual

Under pressure to build, develop, and maintain their identities,people invest more time and effort in their passions

Unconventional entrepreneurs do not consider them-selves entrepreneurs.

passion can provide the stability, meaning, and social recognition

ach individualbecomes an entrepreneurial subject, living their lives like a companyand behaving entrepreneurially at every level (Scharff, 2016). Peopleare asked to use “technologies of the self”(Foucault, 1988) to shapetheir identity corporeally and cognitively so that they may be re-cognised both off- and online

The fig-urehead of work today is the entrepreneur, not in the Schumpeteriansense of the term but the unconventional entrepreneur driven by theprimacy of consumption in contemporary life.

nconventional entrepreneurs are supposed toabsorb and express liquidity by eliminating the barriers between private(consumption) and professional (production) lives.

n-trepreneurs are the embodiment of liquid times where planning be-comes impossible

tribes areconstrued here as sets of individuals who are not homogeneous (interms of their objective social characteristics) but linked by one and thesame passion

With the ad-vent of liquid times, society went from being work-centred to a situa-tion where people's lives increasingly centred on consumption

Unconventional entrepreneurs want to please the commu-nity but some adjustments and choices have to be made to fit their ownagenda. Even if their endeavour is conducted with passion, it is also aproject that, at some point, is expected to deliver a return on invest-ment. The balance seems hard to maintain but remains essential forunconventional entrepreneurs who do not want to disappoint theirtribe

purposeful investments in cultural capital

To exploit cultural opportunity, they accept thecultural mission (Pedeliento, Bettinelli, Andreini, & Bergamaschi, 2018)of bridging the inside community with outside society.

Beyond cultural competency, unconventional entrepreneurs manageand commercialise emotional bonds. This type of entrepreneurship re-quires significant and novel forms of emotional labour from both theentrepreneur and the broader tribe (

veryday lifemoved from being stable and secure to greater uncertainty and rapidchange. He also applies the adjective in a very precise context. Societyis to be considered liquid if the situation people find themselves in andwherein they act changes before they have the time to consolidate theirbehaviour into procedures and habits.

liquid modernity

Unconventional entrepreneurs are also able to transition beyondtheir status as fan consumers to become entrepreneurs operating be-yond the scope of the tribe. Such entrepreneurs have their feet in twocamps, interacting with tribes at a professional level while maintainingtribal roots at an individual level.

There is a connective passion (Ranfagni & Runfola,2018) between the personal and professional spheres of the peopleinvolved