Drawing Entrepreneurship from the Inside: Visualising Entrepreneuring through Rich Pictures in a Science-Intensive Context

Entrepreneurship as Practice (EaP) reframes entrepreneurial activity as an emergent, relational, and situated set of practices, challenging static stage-based or trait-centred models of venture creation (Champenois et al., 2020; Thompson et al., 2020; Teague et al., 2021; Champenois et al., 2025). Building on recent theoretical work that highlights practice as performative enactment that is done and performed through situated, relational practices rather than as a set of traits or static outcomes (Hickey and Riddle, (2025) and the intertwining of practice with identity construction (Hong, Zhao and Snell, 2022), we investigate how entrepreneurial actors form everyday practices within a science-based venture embedded in a regulated ecosystem.

This study presents a qualitative case of a husband–wife founding team in a pharmaceutical start-up situated at Science Park in England. Using a rich picture method with founders, we trace how the ensemble of entrepreneurial practices—ranging from customer discovery and regulatory navigation to resource mobilisation and network building—is enacted, stabilised, and re-configured over time. Developed within soft systems methodology (Checkland, 2000), Rich Pictures are participant drawings used as a qualitative research tool to help participants explore their thoughts and feelings about a complex social phenomenon (Parrott, 2019).

Visual artifacts are powerful tools in enhancing understanding of entrepreneurship as practice and capturing day-to-day work of entrepreneurs (Zhao and Ba, 2022). They capture people, artefacts, places, emotions, ideas, and actions (Cristancho and Helmich, 2019), surfacing tacit understandings often inaccessible through linear verbal accounts. By disrupting conventional modes of reasoning (Cristancho et al., 2015), the method enables founders to articulate non-linear, affective, and relational dimensions of their entrepreneurial journeys. Adjacent scholarly fields, including leadership studies (Kado et al., 2023), strategic management (Knight et al., 2018), and organization studies (Höllerer et al., 2019) have increasingly engaged with the methodological challenge of incorporating visual modalities into empirical research to capture complex social processes, relational dynamics, and meaning-making practices that may not be fully accessible through standard approaches alone.

In our study, Rich Pictures were first used as a data collection tool, allowing participants to draw independently and without researcher influence. The visuals then informed interpretive analysis of how practices—customer discovery, regulatory navigation, resource mobilisation, and network building—are enacted, stabilised, and reconfigured over time. The method reveals how actors, artefacts, and regulatory infrastructures co-constitute evolving practices, showing how embeddedness simultaneously stabilises and destabilises entrepreneurial trajectories.

Conceptually, we develop a practice–identity–embeddedness nexus framework to explain how entrepreneurial dynamism emerges through ongoing performative enactment. Founders generate and sustain momentum through iterative cycles of relational engagement, sensemaking, and material action, often “from almost nothing” (Hong, Zhao & Snell, 2022). Entrepreneuring thus unfolds as a performative practice: identities and practices are mutually constituted within a dynamic ecosystem of human and non-human actors.
This study advances EaP scholarship by empirically articulating a practice–identity nexus in a science-intensive, highly regulated context. Methodologically, it demonstrates the theoretical and empirical promise of Rich Pictures for EaP research, expanding available data sources, collection strategies, and analytical perspectives for studying the lived, processual nature of entrepreneurship.

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