How do creative firms strategize creativity? An exploratory study of haute cuisine

This empirical paper explores the process of strategizing creativity in haute cuisine, using the Hungarian Michelin-starred restaurants as a target population. Based on interviews with chefs as well as managers (owners, co-owners, whoever is “in charge” of the business side of the restaurant) from nearly all of the Hungarian Michelin-starred restaurants, we try to understand the dynamic unfolding through the interplay of potentially conflicting drives of creating and strategizing. Our work builds on a line of studies of creativity of chefs in haute cuisine, and we see this empirical paper as the logical next step. We realize through this study that creating and strategizing are even more intertwined and complex in this setting than we expected, and we identify several different archetypes of interactions, that we label based on the manager’s role as: investor, partner, and monarch.