Theories about entrepreneurial discovery are important to entrepreneurship.

However, the
dominant conceptual foundation underlying such theories hinders their development. It assumes
that opportunities form based on either deliberate search or serendipitous discovery. I examine
this unidimensional logic and identify a gap in its informative content. Then, I reframe it into
orthogonal dimensions. The multidimensional model not only describes the same cases as the
unidimensional model but also describes what the unidimensional model cannot, including cases
that are high or low on both dimensions. This extension yields a 2 × 2 conceptual foundation for
entrepreneurial discovery theory that promotes the development and coordination of distinct
theoretic streams.

Theories about entrepreneurial discovery are important to entrepreneurship. However, the

dominant conceptual foundation underlying such theories hinders their development. It assumes
that opportunities form based on either deliberate search or serendipitous discovery. I examine
this unidimensional logic and identify a gap in its informative content. Then, I reframe it into
orthogonal dimensions. The multidimensional model not only describes the same cases as the
unidimensional model but also describes what the unidimensional model cannot, including cases
that are high or low on both dimensions. This extension yields a 2 × 2 conceptual foundation for
entrepreneurial discovery theory that promotes the development and coordination of distinct
theoretic streams.

How we understand entrepreneurship is a function of the stories we tell. This article uses insights
from process theory to explore the ways in which an entrepreneur can employ a story to mobilize
others to shed conflicting viewpoints to converge with the abstract. In this story, regulation as a
reification of past procedures did not fully account for organizational realities of mailroom
inspections conducted by the military post office, so an appeal to foundational values was
adopted to alter the shared vision of future potentiality and overcome bureaucratic barriers
through the creation of adhocracies. As a result of overcoming interorganizational boundaries, a
technocrat became an entrepreneur by changing the view of stakeholders from a fixed audience
to active co-authors during the spawning of adhocracies. The creation of adhocracies in this story
is explored through an autoethnographic layered account, which is a storytelling approach that
mirrors the co-construction of the narratives found within this paper?s vignettes. The
understanding of entrepreneurship provided in this paper challenges commonly held
assumptions of entrepreneurship, in addition to corporate, organizational and public service
entrepreneurship, as well as the methods and writing styles to explore these concepts.