Prospecting the Past for the Future: Storytelling in Making an Emerging Innovative Business Domain

Abstract

In innovative business domains, there is a multitude of actors with a range of interests and expectations. The actors make sense of the past, present, and future as they collaborate and make collective sense of emerging business opportunities in the domain. This chapter examines such sensemaking in an emerging innovative business domain of personalized medicine. We explore multiple fragments of stories and identify three antenarratives: innovation, integration, and institutionalization. These antenarratives anticipate the promotion of personalized medicine in Finland. The results of our study show that the future is projected through history as storytellers make sense of plausible past evidence and experiences. This study contributes to storytelling organization theory and the antenarrative literature on prospective sensemaking by highlighting temporality in lived experience and the dialogical dynamics that make history for the future in business storytelling.