Leveraging Paradoxes for New Venture Ideation: A Cultural Tightness-Looseness Theory

Paradoxes are inherent to the fundamental tensions within the entrepreneurial journey. Thus, understanding how entrepreneurs habitually navigate the many seeming contradictions endemic to new venture development is critical. While extant studies have focused on the specifics of select (often dichotomous) paradoxical tensions in entrepreneurship, knowledge surrounding the cognitive aptitude, more broadly, for how and when entrepreneurs embrace paradoxes for constructive outcomes is surprisingly scant. We are the first to probe the role of a paradox mindset on practically important initiation-stage outcomes: new venture idea quantity and quality. Integrating insights from cross-cultural psychology, we adopt an international experimental priming design (n = 506) to test the distal and proximal effect of personal cross-cultural experience on new venture ideation through the mediating role of a paradox mindset. We provide some causal evidence that it is the generalized immersion and experience of interaction with foreign cultures that bolsters these important entrepreneurial dynamics. Drawing from cultural tightness-looseness theory, we investigate boundary conditions and find that the looseness of one’s home country culture bolsters overall new venture idea quantity and feasibility of these ideas, but not the originality of their content (i.e., an aspect of quality). Implications for future research are discussed.