Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Potential Partners or Distant Cousins?

Creativity and entrepreneurship, like innovation, have been recognized as important contributors to a nation’s economic growth. Creativity plays an important role in the fuzzy front end of a firm’s innovation process and also in corporate venturing processes, but the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurship to a large extent has not explicitly been examined. This exploratory conceptual paper briefly reviews the separate bodies of research on creativity and entrepreneurship, identifying similarities and differences in constructs and applications and identifying implications for business and for management education. We then propose some research propositions and directions for future research to investigate potential synergies of creativity and entrepreneurship and to progress the distinctness of each notion in landscapes of innovative firms.