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1. Introduction
Today, organization and management scholars broadly agree that that the increasingly dynamic and turbulent business environment (Al Humaidan and Sabatier, 2017) as well as the inexorable challenges of social and environmental sustainability call for the appropriate business model innovation and the corresponding change management strategies (Chesbrough, 2010; Gambardella and McGahan, 2010; Spieth et al., 2014; Zott and Amit, 2010; Millar et al., 2012). Business model innovation has led to dramatic organizational change in a wide variety of business contexts, including digital transformations (Wargin and Dobiéy, 2001; Jackson and Harris, 2003), strategic management challenges (Chesbrough, 2006; Richardson, 2008; Zott and Amit, 2008), technology and innovation management (Pateli and Giaglis, 2005; Chesbrough, 2007; Gambardella and McGahan, 2010; Zott and Amit, 2010; Huang et al., 2013; Basile and Faraci, 2015), or sustainability management (Millar et al., 2012; Schaltegger et al., 2016).
These developments in the business world invite a rethinking of the longstanding issue of the origin of business opportunities. The persisting prominence of business model innovation casts doubts on the validity of the once prevalent view that these opportunities are “out there” in the business environment waiting to be discovered by alert entrepreneurs (Kirzner, 1997; Shane, 2003; McGrath, 2010; Fiet et al., 2013). In today’s world, it is increasingly clear that business opportunities are not only discovered but also increasingly constructed, and it is this precisely this construction that is supposed to be enabled by innovative business models. In essence, business model development and innovation are tantamount to the proactive and performative in-house design of business opportunities.
The mechanism of the creation of business opportunities still remains an undertheorized issue though. If the observation of the business environment is done by alert entrepreneurs, what kinds of agents are responsible for the performative creation of business opportunities? An important strand of the scholarly literature addressed this question by shifting the object of the alertness of individual entrepreneurs from the discovery to the creation of business opportunities (Alvarez and Barney, 2007; Ramoglou and Tsang, 2016; Korsgaard, 2013; Ramoglou and Zyglidopoulos, 2015; Short et al., 2010). This line of reasoning is likewise characteristic of the notable contributions from structuration theory (Chiasson and Saunders, 2005; Sarason et al., 2010), critical realism...