Exploring the ‘first change’ experience through the theory of creative action

This work analyzes entrepreneurship literature to show the inconsistency of exploring change within the means-ends schema. It rejects the viewpoint that opportunities are unseen objects of the environment while suggesting to root the process of entrepreneuring in pragmatism. Opportunities then are defined as the life experience of ‘creating the problem’. Drawing on Mead, this work rejects the dualisms of subjects and objects by including subjectivity in Darwin’s sensorymotor learning. Drawing on Joas’ pragmatism, instead it assumes that the problem which enacts interaction is not given, but defined as a subjective pre-reflective goal. We claim that the definition of the problem is the core issue of entrepreneurship, but also that Joas’ pre-reflective goals are only a partial way to define the problem. Drawing on Shotter’s practical hermeneutics, therefore it explores this process as experience embedded in the subject’s background and oriented by an imaginary and a horizon. By drawing on few narratives about the start-up of few entrepreneurial companies, the definition of the problem appears as the way a ‘first change’ creates the opportunity o start a new business. Then data throughout the life of entrepreneurial entrepreneuring occurs always as a ‘first change’ event.