Entrepreneurial opportunities detection: An individual and organizational factors model

abstract

© 2018 Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All rights reserved. Scholars have approached entrepreneurial opportunities from very different perspectives both theoretically and empirically. As a result, this amount of work conducted by researchers on entrepreneurial opportunities and processes of opportunity recognition, identification, or detection has been somewhat inconsistent and is yet to be generalized to our general understanding. An entrepreneurial opportunity is of the utmost importance to the entrepreneurship process conducted by individuals and organizations. Entrepreneurship is associated with innovation, economic development, and expected return on investments for stakeholders. However, innovation efforts and development of new products and technologies do not automatically ensure entrepreneurial opportunities and value creation. The key challenge is to discover and exploit the potential of innovative products or services through the entrepreneurial process. This paper explores the impact of entrepreneurial alertness along with other factors on the corporate environment; and builds on existing theoretical and empirical studies in the area of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and development. We apply the prescriptions of the alertness and entrepreneurial orientation perspectives to develop a model of entrepreneurial opportunity detection. We propose and analyse opportunity detection as an initially constructed cognitive representation, assuming one were to exploit the opportunity detected at a later stage of the entrepreneurship process. Thus, this paper identifies both the entrepreneur's personality traits (alertness) and organizational characteristics (entrepreneurial orientation) as antecedents of entrepreneurial discovery of business opportunities. The focus of this research is to identify key factors that explain and provide knowledge about the mechanism of initial detection of entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper posits that individual trait approaches and entrepreneurial orientation in enterprises may combine and explain the finding of opportunities. This mix of individual traits and organizational factors is explored with a survey to CEOs and Executive Managers of 295 SMEs. Findings in this research may benefit individuals and enterprises in developing their entrepreneurial opportunities recognition abilities. A theoretical model of opportunity detection, a multilevel analysis, a set of hypotheses, and suggestions for further research are provided.