Actualizing entrepreneurial futures: Imaginaries, Visions, and the Olivetti Corporation

Entrepreneurship is often understood as the pursuit of opportunities or the creation of new ventures, yet these perspectives offer limited insight into how entrepreneurs sustain coherence between imagined futures and feasible action over extended periods of time. Entrepreneurs commit resources and coordinate others around desired futures they believe can be brought into being. Emerging work reconceptualizes entrepreneurship as a process of actualization, yet we still know little about how actualization unfolds over time, particularly when entrepreneurs pursue morally and culturally meaningful futures that must be reconciled with shifting conditions of feasibility. Drawing on a historical process analysis of Adriano Olivetti and the Olivetti Corporation, we theorize entrepreneurial actualization as a recursive relationship between entrepreneurial imaginaries (historically situated, value-laden conceptions of desirable futures) and entrepreneurial visions (pathways that are feasible in the present and translate those aspirations into commitments and actualization practices). While imaginaries articulate what ought to be realized, visions specify what can be realized under existing constraints. Our process model explains actualization coherence: the extent to which evolving action remains connected to the desired future that gives it purpose and direction. We show that such coherence erodes when the capacity to recalibrate visions is lost, as occurred after Olivetti's death. We contribute to research on entrepreneurship as actualization, on entrepreneurial process, and on the extended temporal horizons across which entrepreneurial futures unfold, persist, and sometimes outlive the ventures that pursued them.