Ebtrepreneurship

The following fundamental pillars are essential to the phenomenon of Entrepreneurship; Creativity, innovation, opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation.

Identifying and selecting the right opportunities for new businesses are among the most important abilities of a successful entrepreneur (Stevenson et al., 1985). Consequently, Explaining the discovery and development of opportunities is a key part of entrepreneurship research (Venkataraman, 1997). Numerous models of opportunity recognition and/or development have been presented in recent years.

Opportunity development

Opportunities begin as simple concepts that become more elaborate as entrepreneurs develop them. This process involves proactive efforts much like that of new product development, but the developmental process here gives rise to an entire business, not just a product (Pavia, 1991). Our position here departs from earlier literature (e.g., Kirzner, 1973) that considers opportunity recognition largely a process of discovering something already formed. We regard opportunity development as a continuous, proactive process essential to the formation of a business.

Opportunity recognition

Opportunities develop as individuals shape elemental ideas into full-blown business plans. But the process of opportunity development is conceptually distinct from opportunity recognition or identification. What most literature in entrepreneurship calls ‘‘opportunity recognition'' appears to include three distinct processes: (1) sensing or perceiving market needs and/or underemployed resources, (2) recognizing or discovering a ‘‘fit'' between particular market needs and specified resources, and (3) creating a new ‘‘fit'' between heretofore separate needs and resources in the form of a business concept (Hills, 1995; De Koning, 1999). These processes represent, respectively, perception, discovery, and creation — not simply ‘‘recognition'' (Christensen et al., 1989; Conway and McGuinness, 1986; Singh et al., 1999).

I. ENTREPRENEURSHIP

NTREPRENEURSHIP involves the nexus of two phenomena: the presence of lucrative opportunities and the presence of enterprising individuals. A. Definition of Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organizing, markets, process, and raw materials through organizing efforts that previously had not existed [1], [2]. Given this definition, the academic field of entrepreneurship incorporates, in its domain, explanations for why, when and how entrepreneurial opportunities exist; the sources of those opportunities and the forms that they take; the processes of opportunity discovery and evaluation; the acquisition of resources for the exploitation of these opportunities; the act of opportunity exploitation; why, when, and how some individuals and not others discover, evaluate, gather resources for and exploit opportunities; the strategies used to pursue opportunities; and the organizing efforts to exploit them [2].

Typology of Opportunity Enactment

Each opportunity has particular content, i.e. demand and supply parameters bounded in a particular space and time. Similar to a hypothesis, an opportunity emerges from a body of knowledge that is conceptually extended to form a perceived relationship that is to be empirically tested. This conceptual extension represents the structure of opportunity enactment. As an opportunity involves the matching of demand and

supply in the market place, one possible difference to the knowledge base involved in opportunity enactment has to do with whether there is perceived knowledge of a source of demand or a source of supply, or both. This focus on demand supply reflects some of the attempts at developing opportunity typologies [9]. The labels of "replication," "demand," and "supply" refer to the knowledge base from which the hypothesis is derived. For example, a person may be aware of a current business and consider its replication; another may be aware of unsatisfied customer needs and conceive a way of satisfying these needs; yet another may be aware of a new technological invention and conceive of a need that this invention may satisfy. These three types of opportunity-derivation processes