Curiosity and curious search in Entrepreneurship

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.