Tourism Towns and Entrepreneurial Orientation: The Identification and Exploitation of Opportunities

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and the process of identifying and exploiting business opportunities. The focus of the research is a case study of a town visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists each year and in which there appears to be no business activity linked to the tourism and leisure sector. The paper analyses 34 firms established in the town (83% of the population) using a structural equation model (partial least square). The results demonstrate, first, that the most entrepreneurial businesses are those most open to identifying new opportunity and this identification is the main determinant of the decision to exploit that opportunity. Second, results show that younger entrepreneurs with high level of education and experience are more orientated to identify new opportunities. And, third, younger and smaller firms demonstrate a more entrepreneurial behaviour.