5 ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION Vol 15, No 1, 2014, pp 5–15 doi: 10.5367/ijei.2014.0141 Entrepreneurial remixing: bricolage and postmodern resources Dave Valliere and Thomas Gegenhuber Abstract: The innovation of organizations has been likened to the im- provisation capacity of musicians playing jazz – a modernist form of music that emphasizes improvisation within the boundaries of a particular genre. But recent bricolage research suggests that this metaphor is incom- plete when applied to entrepreneurs. The innovation of entrepreneurs lies not only in the improvisational combining of resources, but also in the eclectic selection of resources and the embedding of these innovative combinations into novel contexts. This makes entrepreneurs less like jazz musicians and more like hip-hop DJs – a postmodern form of music that emphasizes sampling and remixing of musical fragments from diverse genres. This paper places entrepreneurial bricolage into a larger postmodern context and thereby identifies other unexplored implications for entrepreneurial value creation. By drawing from postmodern theorists, it explicates broader design principles that are latent only in the current narrow bricolage perspectives. A model is developed for how entrepre- neurs enact postmodern resources and markets through hyperdifferentiation, how they develop novel pastiches using techniques such as bricolage, and how they embed these pastiches into novel contexts that create value from three distinct sources. Specific propositions and implications for entrepreneurs and researchers are developed. Keywords: entrepreneurial innovation; bricolage; postmodernism; remixing; jazz Dave Valliere (corresponding author) is with the Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria St, Toronto, Ontario M5B 2K3, Canada. E-mail: valliere@ryerson.ca. Thomas Gegenhuber is with the Institute of Organization and Global Management Studies, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. Considerable recent research attention has been devoted to the role of bricolage in entrepreneurship (for example, Baker, 2007; Phillips and Tracey, 2007; Senyard et al, 2011; Fisher, 2012). Bricolage is based on the philo- sophical work of Lévi-Strauss (1967), who proposed a mode of mythological thought that proceeds from whatever resources may be at hand to discover new problems and to work out new solutions to them. This mode of thought stands in contrast to a more engineered approach that works backwards from a desired goal to the possible precursor states using causal logic. Bricolage is based on experimenting with combinations of resources to achieve new purposes, especially ‘the combination and reuse of resources for different applica- tions than those they were intended to’ (Baker and Nelson, 2005, p 335). It entails creating something by making do with whatever resources are at hand, and by challenging perceived limitations instead of enacting