Content area
Full Text
Abstract: Little is known about actual cognitive strategies in relation to the identification of different business opportunity types and settings. This paper investigates the roles of two pairs of cognitive strategies - divergent and convergent thinking - in the context of the opportunity recognition impetus, process and different opportunity types. While works on creativity have acknowledged the importance of both divergent and convergent thinking for innovation, entrepreneurship research has not yet empirically examined their joint roles over the course of this front-end entrepreneurship process. This paper does not only close this gap by means of a multiple-case study analysis with 32 entrepreneurs and their opportunity cases, but also investigates underlying cognitive processes and some important context-specific aspects that are crucial to understand entrepreneurial success.
Keywords: Entrepreneurial opportunities; opportunity recognition; entrepreneurial cognition; entrepreneurial creativity; divergent thinking; opportunity types; convergent thinking; business models; new products; innovation
1Introduction
Entrepreneurial Opportunity Recognition (EOR) describes the front-end process of entrepreneurship and is central to the entrepreneurship research stream (Ardichvili, Cardozo, and Ray, 2003; Baron, 2006). Without the recognition of preceding entrepreneurial opportunities, innovative new ventures would be unlikely to come into existence (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). The capacity to innovate faster is inevitable in today's dynamic business environments with changing market needs, technological developments and short innovation cycles (Spiegel and Marxt, 2015). A better understanding of how attractive opportunities for innovative businesses are identified is therefore necessary for both the entrepreneurship and innovation research communities, for entrepreneurship education and innovation practices in established firms alike (Christensen, Madsen, and Peterson, 1994).
Entrepreneurship scholars acknowledge that EOR starts as a cognitive process in entrepreneurial minds, which is why the cognitive perspective has become an integral research stream within the entrepreneurship community (Baron, 2006; Grégoire, Barr, and Shepherd, 2010). One central aspect of entrepreneurial cognition related to EOR is creativity, through which entrepreneurs identify novel and useful ideas (Baron, 2004; Ward, 2004). Surprisingly, despite its important role for EOR (Corbett, 2007; Hansen, Lumpkin, and Hills, 2011; Kirzner, 1999), empirical studies on the actual facilitation of creative thinking and the way in which it influences EOR are scarce. Only recent studies have demonstrated the positive role of the divergent thinking ability (a widely used measure for creative thinking) for the identification of opportunities...