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Abstract

We develop a multilevel theory of the activation and regulation of bio-emotional energy in entrepreneurial systems to explain the transformational endogenous dynamics by which the entrepreneur’s vision of a new future enterprise is realized. By an entrepreneurial system we mean the entrepreneur and the core group of individuals who collaborate to achieve the entrepreneur’s vision or goal (Bruyat & Julien, 2001). We begin with the premise that the entrepreneur is passionately committed to the implementation of a "new" idea that defies or goes beyond the current norms and/or rationality of the existing business order, and that the entrepreneurial system is an order for generating innovative and/or radical economic change in society. But change—the creation of something new—requires additional bio-emotional energy beyond that needed for the maintenance of established order. Drawing on Bradley and Pribram’s (1998) theory of social communication, in which the principles of quantum holography are combined with complex dynamical systems theory—so-called "chaos theory" (Prigogine, 1977; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984)—we describe how the psychophysiological and socioemotional energetic interactions within and among the members of the entrepreneurial system operate to generate a stable platform of psychosocial organization for building a transformational enterprise that is intuitively in-formed (given shape) by the entrepreneur’s passionatelyheld vision of the future. The theory also explains how these dynamics affect the degree to which a coherent order of socioemotional relations emerges and describes how socioemotional coherence can amplify the energetic signal by which future opportunities can be intuitively located and intentionally actualized into being.