“The best way to predict the future is to create it”: Entrepreneurship as a nexus of future-making practices

Entrepreneurial activities are fundamentally future-oriented: actors face future deadlines, make predictions about prospective business opportunities, and may need to accelerate their activities to align expectations for projected outcomes. Yet surprisingly, the future is still often treated as a mere context variable in entrepreneurship research, rather than as actively produced through situated daily activities. This limits our understanding of how entrepreneurial actors engage with tensions that arise when multiple futures coexist, and why coordinating them in their daily work is often experienced as difficult yet consequential. This paper advances a future-making lens on entrepreneurial practices by conceptualizing entrepreneuring as the ongoing enactment of multiple futures in tension through daily practices. I argue that such tensions arise from the simultaneous enactment of incompatible categories of future-making practices. Building on a practice perspective, I develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes three temporal categories of future-making in entrepreneurship and theorizes the temporal coordination practices through which entrepreneurial actors manage emerging tensions. By reconceptualizing entrepreneurship as an effortful accomplishment of the future through practices, the paper opens new avenues for entrepreneurship-as-practice research to study how entrepreneurship is enacted through a nexus of daily practices that make the future.