# When Selling the Impossible, Blend Reality with Dreams
Imagine living in a manufactured habitat floating in space between Earth and the moon. Your days unfold in what resembles "Maui on its best day, all year long," with shirt-sleeve weather year-round. You commute via high-speed transport between agricultural zones and urban centers. When you want to unwind, you head to recreation areas where you can fly using your own wings in zero gravity.
It might sound like science fiction, but in 2019, Jeff Bezos, founder of space technology company Blue Origin, presented these orbital colony concepts to an audience of journalists, space industry executives, and policymakers. His pitch exemplifies what researchers now identify as a crucial tool for entrepreneurs pursuing ventures that defy conventional categories: fictional framing.
According to new research by Luis Martins, a professor of management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, fictional framing represents a narrative strategy fundamentally different from traditional business pitches. The research, published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and co-authored with Violina Rindova of the University of California, Irvine, and McCombs doctoral student Meenal Banga, examines how entrepreneurs can win support for ideas that have no existing market categories—things like species de-extinction, extended human lifespans, or orbiting space colonies.
The challenge is cognitive distance. "The cognitive distance between today's world and the proposed one leaves stakeholders with nothing familiar to measure the idea against," Martins explains. Conventional entrepreneurial pitches create familiarity and fit with existing understandings. They ask people to consider whether a concept is probable. Fictional framing does something else entirely: it makes people think about what might be possible.
This shift from probable to possible changes the conversation. Possibilistic thinking doesn't weigh how likely something is to happen. Instead, it considers how much it would matter if it were to happen. The strategy then invites people to collaborate in making it real. "It's about, 'Help me think about what it could be,'" Martins says. "How might this world look? What could we do in this possible world?"
Drawing on literary theory and the psychology of fiction, the researchers identified three mental processes that fictional framing activates. First, immersion and transportation: by mixing known elements with imagined ones—like describing space colonies as having Maui-like weather—entrepreneurs help stakeholders disengage from the status quo and entertain possibilities rather than dismiss them.
Second, mental simulation: Bezos populated his imagined colonies with recognizable features like high-speed transport, agricultural areas, and cities, then added fictional elements like zero-gravity recreation zones. Starting with the familiar provides mental scaffolding that helps listeners imagine the unfamiliar.
Third, filling gaps: fiction keeps narratives deliberately incomplete so listeners can fill in blanks from their own experience and imagination. When Bezos suggested his orbital colonies might have various architectures drastically different from terrestrial cities, he invited stakeholders to create personal interpretations of his vision. They imagine how they might operate within it, converting them from passive audiences into active participants.
The approach isn't limited to technology billionaires or space ventures. Martins suggests fictional framing could apply to any major idea outside existing paradigms—even eliminating poverty in a metropolitan area. "People who live in that area and are anchored in the status quo might have a hard time imagining how that would be possible," he notes. "Fictional framing can make an idea that feels cognitively distant more actionable."
As entrepreneurs increasingly propose radically novel projects with far-reaching consequences, fictional framing offers what Martins calls "an important strategic tool for innovation" that can help people tackle audacious, transformational changes.
**Sources:**
https://phys.org/news/2026-09-fictional-blends-reality-fantasy-investors.html