You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to be entrepreneurial: The unique role of imaginativeness in new venture ideation Jeffery S. McMullen *, Alexander S. Kier Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, 1309 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, U.S.A. 1. Entrepreneurs and new venture ideation Coming up with a million-dollar idea is difficult, much less several of them. That is why we stand in awe of people like Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop, founder of Ingenious Designs, and inspiration for the movie Joy starring Jennifer Law- rence. Like an entrepreneurial cliché, Mangano used her own savings and investments from family and friends in 1990 to develop her first invention, the Miracle Mop, a self-wringing plastic mop with a head made from a continuous loop of 300 feet of cotton that could easily be wrung out without get- ting the user’ s hands wet. After selling 18,000 mops in less than half an hour on QVC, Mangano incorpo- rated her business and eventually sold it to the parent company of the Home Shopping Network Business Horizons (2017) 60, 455—462 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor KEYWORDS Entrepreneurship creativity; Imaginativeness; Ideation; New startup ideas; Entrepreneurial ideas Abstract Bestsellers like The Lean Startup and Business Model Generation have suggested that ideation–—the generation and selection of ideas–—is important to new venture creation; yet, little empirical research on the topic has been conducted. Using a creative problem-solving approach, we developed and tested a new scale that found imaginativeness predicts new venture ideation over and above the effects of the usual suspects of attitude, knowledge, and evaluation. Imaginativeness is an ideational skill that combines task-relevant knowledge in three distinct domains–—creative, social, and practical–—with the latent ability of imagination. In this article, we explain why a new scale was needed, why imaginativeness appears to be especially useful to individuals who lack entrepreneurial experience, and how imaginativeness enables just about anyone to generate and select new venture ideas with the proficiency of a habitual entrepreneur. # 2017 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author E-mail addresses: mcmullej@indiana.edu (J.S. McMullen), askier@indiana.edu (A.S. Kier) 0007-6813/$ — see front matter # 2017 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2017.03.002