You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to be entrepreneurial: The unique role of imaginativeness in new venture ideation

Bestsellers like The Lean Startup and Business Model Generation have suggested that ideation—the generation and selection of ideas—is important to new venture creation; yet, little empirical research on the topic has been conducted. Using a creative problem-solving approach, we developed and tested a new scale that found imaginativeness predicts new venture ideation over and above the effects of the usual suspects of attitude, knowledge, and evaluation. Imaginativeness is an ideational skill that combines task-relevant knowledge in three distinct domains—creative, social, and practical—with the latent ability of imagination. In this article, we explain why a new scale was needed, why imaginativeness appears to be especially useful to individuals who lack entrepreneurial experience, and how imaginativeness enables just about anyone to generate and select new venture ideas with the proficiency of a habitual entrepreneur.