5
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      A Historical Intervention in the “Opportunity Wars”: Forgotten Scholarship, the Discovery/Creation Disruption, and Moving Forward by Looking Backward

      1 , 2 , 3
      Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
      SAGE Publications

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          There are two battles at the heart of the “opportunity wars”: (1) Are opportunities discovered or created, and (2) Should we perhaps abandon the opportunity concept altogether? We argue that the first question is a pseudo-question, made possible by the loose use of “opportunity” in the discovery/creation debate during the last two decades. However, we refrain from going so far as to conclude that the opportunity concept should be abandoned altogether, since we observe that strategy and entrepreneurship scholarship prior to the 2000s made a more meaningful use of the concept. It alluded to the environmental conditions necessary for the actualization of desirable futures and hardly ever questioned the agent-independence of such conditions. Accordingly, we maintain that the opportunity concept should simply exit the blind alley created by the “discovery/creation” distraction and help reorient attention toward the agent-independent sources of opportunity and threat—beyond unrealistically optimistic views of entrepreneurship as an act of “opportunity discovery” and/or “opportunity creation.”

          Related collections

          Most cited references97

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Discovery and creation: alternative theories of entrepreneurial action

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            THE PROMISE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS A FIELD OF RESEARCH.

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Prior Knowledge and the Discovery of Entrepreneurial Opportunities

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                (View ORCID Profile)
                Journal
                Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
                Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
                SAGE Publications
                1042-2587
                1540-6520
                March 03 2022
                : 104225872110693
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
                [2 ]Department of Entrepreneurship, Babson College, Babson Park, MA, USA
                [3 ]Department of Organization and Entrepreneurship, Linnaeus University, Vaxjo, Sweden
                Article
                10.1177/10422587211069310
                9f971526-8d48-4f8a-90fe-abd2ccd2ebbf
                © 2022

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

                History

                Comments

                Comment on this article