Reflecting on a fluid research approach

This developmental paper is the first step towards a full paper on the fluid research approach of a phenomenological study on culinary innovation. One of the characteristics of our study is that we gained access and interviewed 19 of the best chefs in the world, which was facilitated and led to in-depth conversations between experts due to the fact that one of us is a trained chef. Initially, we had no pre-formed research framework, which, with hindsight, was rather risky. Yet, we were able to collect rich insights into the lived experience of culinary innovation. In this paper we intend to articulate this research approach by particularly focusing on the philosophical framing and the data collection and analysis methods that we used. We intend to recall the many situations when we changed direction, amended or rejected our objectives until we were able to finally describe what is of the essence