This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Picture yourself in a manufactured colony that orbits between Earth and the moon. It might sound like science fiction, but it's part of a 2019 presentation made by Jeff Bezos, founder of the space technology company Blue Origin, to an audience of journalists, space industry executives and policymakers.
Such ventures are part of a growing cadre of radically novel business ideas that invite stakeholders to imagine market categories that have never existed, such as species de-extinction and extended human lifespans. To obtain support for such concepts, founders need to go beyond standard pitches, according to new research by Luis Martins, professor of management and Zlotnik Family Chair in Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. The research is published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.
What is required is what he calls fictional framing. It's a narrative strategy that constructs a future world blending the real and imaginary, such as factories on a massive, self-contained habitat floating in space. Though telling a story, it makes something drastically radical seem possible.
To help build such projects, entrepreneurs need to enlist partners, investors, regulators, employees and the public. But, Martins says, "The cognitive distance between today's world and the proposed one leaves stakeholders with nothing familiar to measure the idea against." With Violina Rindova of the University of California, Irvine, and Meenal Banga, a McCombs doctoral student, Martins drew on literary theory and the psychology of fiction to build a model of how to close that distance. Fictional framing is distinct from conventional entrepreneurial framing, which seeks to create familiarity and fit with existing understandings, Martins says.
Instead of asking people to consider whether a concept is probable, it gets them thinking about what might be possible. Possibilistic thinking doesn't ask how likely something is to happen. It asks how much it would matter if it were to happen.
It then invites people to collaborate in making it real. "It's about, 'Help me think about what it could be,'" he says. "How might this world look?
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