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What entrepreneurs discover when creating opportunities? Insights from Skype and YouTube ventures

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Abstract

Although the scholarly conversation about how entrepreneurial opportunities emerge has suggested that entrepreneurs both discover and create opportunity components, specific knowledge about what components are discovered is lacking. In this research, we use an exploratory case study to investigate the opportunity creation process. We found that entrepreneurs discover several opportunity-related components based on the prior experience and knowledge of other entrepreneurs. Drawing on the evidence from these exploratory cases, we identify three important types of components that entrepreneurs creatively recombine within an emerging opportunity: technology stack, business model, and product and service design architecture. These findings have important implications for our understanding of entrepreneurial bricolage and entrepreneurial recycling, and their connection to the process of opportunity creation.

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Notes

  1. The protocols used for the collection are available from the authors upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Kardeljeva pl. 17, 1000, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Rok Stritar & Mateja Drnovšek

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  1. Rok Stritar
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  2. Mateja Drnovšek
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Correspondence to Rok Stritar.

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Stritar, R., Drnovšek, M. What entrepreneurs discover when creating opportunities? Insights from Skype and YouTube ventures. Int Entrep Manag J 12, 659–679 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-015-0362-7

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