Grappling with the Unbearable Elusiveness of Entrepreneurial Opportunities (original) (raw)
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International Small Business Journal
This article has two objectives: to critique the dominant opportunity discovery and creation literatures and to propose a new, critical realist–inspired analytical framework to theorise the causes, processes and consequences of entrepreneurial action – one that needs no concept of opportunity. We offer three reasons to support our critique of opportunity studies. First, there are important absences, contradictions and inconsistencies in definitions of opportunity in theoretical and empirical work that mean the term cannot signal a clear direction for theorising or empirical research. Our central criticism is that the concept of opportunity cannot refer simultaneously, without contradiction, to a social context offering profit-making prospects, to particular practices and to agents’ subjective beliefs or imagined futures. Second, a new definition of opportunity would perpetuate the conceptual chaos. Third, useful concepts to capture important entrepreneurial processes are readily ava...
International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 2016
There is plenty of debate in the entrepreneurship literature regarding entrepreneurial opportunity. There also has been a lack of construct clarity. These two issues have combined to stifle progress in understanding this important phenomenon. We believe that across these debates there are many underlying commonalities and potential for more clear constructs. In this paper we review how scholars have defined and operationalized entrepreneurial opportunity and opportunity-related processes in order to better understand what they really mean when they say ‘opportunity’. We found a total of 102 definitions and 51 operationalisations from 105 articles published in leading entrepreneurship and management journals. A total of 81 elements were identified across the definitions and operationalisations and compiled into an integrated process model. The model incorporates what seemed to be disparate views into a single unifying model. Comparison between conceptual definitions and operationalisations reveals many elements that are missing either conceptual or empirical attention. The model will help scholars more easily identify and build upon prior research. To that effect, numerous suggestions for future research are discussed and are summarized in a table.
What is an Entrepreneurial Opportunity
The nature and source of entrepreneurial opportunity are important issues for understanding how markets function and come into being. In addition to describing the forum held on the topic and summarizing the contributions of the articles that appear in the special issue, this article shares a number of lessons learned during the workshop and the editorial process. We explore three of the most important reasons for confusion about the opportunity construct: (1) the ''objectivity'' of opportunity, (2) the perceived importance of one particular individual in determining the direction of the social world and (3) what distinguishes the sub-class of ''entrepreneurial'' opportunity from the broader category of opportunity in general. Finally, we offer some directions for future research by illuminating important issues that emerged from the workshop but that remain largely unanswered by the papers of this special issue.
A CONSTRUCTIVIST FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING ENTREPRENEURIAL OPPORTUNITIES (SUMMARY
2006
Research on entrepreneurship has multiplied in recent years, according an increasingly important role to the concept of market opportunities. However, this term is still often defined in an implicit manner, which often hides the wealth and complexity of the object of this study. This article aims to show that epistemological clarification allows for both: -avoidance of economists' bias, which has irrigated most literature on opportunity, -identification of the main dimensions of this phenomenon, dimensions which, until now, have been mainly ignored or underestimated.
Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research, 2009
We examined 19 years of conceptual and operational definitions of entrepreneurial opportunity and opportunity-related processes (recognition, discovery, etc.). We found 56 articles in 6 entrepreneurship-focused publications, with 23 conceptual and 6 operational definitions of opportunity as well as 25 conceptual and 24 operational definitions of opportunity-related processes. Among those definitions, we identified 25 distinct definitional elements and 12 operational elements of opportunity as well as 48 definitional elements ...
2020
We highlight the important role that time plays in conceptualizations of opportunity in entrepreneurship research. Through two longitudinal case studies, we introduce a more dynamic understanding of opportunities than portrayed by current theorizing, which tends to emphasize “opportunity discovery.” By adopting a dynamic temporal perspective, we integrate Kirzner’s and Mises’s approaches to entrepreneurial action to generate novel insights about how entrepreneurs view opportunities as initial opportunity beliefs, how these beliefs change over time, and how these changes help inform scholarly research of opportunities. We argue that taking the role of time into consideration opens up new questions related to opportunity and the dynamics of its development.
The Eureka Moment in Entrepreneurial Opportunity as an Imaginative Construct
Entrepreneurial opportunity stimulates action. Does it only stimulate entrepreneurs to action? Or to non-entrepreneurs as well? What it is, and what it is not? Who is an entrepreneur? The concept of opportunity has been a bedrock in entrepreneurship research since Shane and Venkataraman’s seminal work in 2000. Researchers have explored the emergence, the role and the purpose of opportunity since then. Despite more than two decades of scholarship on the construct that has moved us well beyond what Shane and Venkataraman originally defined and with seminal papers that have moved us toward a better and more sophisticated understanding of the opportunity, we are still asking who an entrepreneur is? Ramoglou, Gartner and Tsang argue that this is the wrong question. The definitional varieties and fragments move Davidsson to suggest dismantling the construct and re-contextualising it with a more suitable and coherent framework. Foss and Klein suggest doing away with the opportunity concept...
Defragmenting Definitions of Entrepreneurial Opportunity
We examined 19-years worth of definitions of entrepreneurial opportunity and opportunity-related processes. We found 56 articles in six entrepreneurship-focused publications, with a total of 49 conceptual definitions and 32 operational definitions. Among those definitions, we identified 25 distinct conceptual and 12 operational elements of opportunity plus 48 definitional and 39 operational elements of opportunity-related processes. We found considerable fragmentation across conceptual and operational elements. However, based on commonalities among conceptual definitions, we developed six composite conceptual definitions of opportunity and eight composite conceptual definitions of opportunity-related processes, which we hope will help reduce the fragmentation of the entrepreneurial opportunity literature.