What entrepreneurs discover when creating opportunities? Insights from Skype and YouTube ventures

Abstract

Although the scholarly conversation about how entrepreneurial opportunities emerge has suggested that entrepreneurs both discover and create opportunity components, specific knowledge about what components are discovered is lacking. In this research, we use an exploratory case study to investigate the opportunity creation process. We found that entrepreneurs discover several opportunity-related components based on the prior experience and knowledge of other entrepreneurs. Drawing on the evidence from these exploratory cases, we identify three important types of components that entrepreneurs creatively recombine within an emerging opportunity: technology stack, business model, and product and service design architecture. These findings have important implications for our understanding of entrepreneurial bricolage and entrepreneurial recycling, and their connection to the process of opportunity creation.

Is small really beautiful? A review of the concept of niches in innovation

“…In the development of new niche opportunities, both Park (2005) and Berkhout et al (2011) suggest the process requires a complex interaction between entrepreneurial knowledge, firm competence and technological potential. Stritar and Drnovšek (2016) and Breschi et al (2014) also stress the role of knowledge (see also Marvel and Droege, 2010). Entrepreneurial learning and strategic positioning have both been identified as an aspect of successes in addressing new niche opportunities (Coles and Jones 2000;Dickson et al 1996;Gaudes 2004;Gruber et al 2008).…”

Career sustainability of digital micro-entrepreneurs: strategic insights from YouTubers in India

“…This is despite more than 500 h of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute (Hale, 2019), with more than one billion hours of video watched daily (Chi, 2022). Consequently, digital platforms like YouTube have ushered in a new era of entrepreneurship in which traditional techniques for pursuing entrepreneurial ventures are being questioned and refashioned (Stritar and Drnov sek, 2016). Digitalisation has democratised entrepreneurship, allowing a more extensive and varied group of individuals to participate in various phases of the entrepreneurial process.…”

Food systems in transition: conceptualizing sustainable food entrepreneurship

“…Furthermore, artefacts allow exploring how imagined futures are received in a specific environment (Sarasvathy, 2001). By founding a firm or introducing a product, the underlying idea is tested in a certain sociomaterial context and the resulting feedback can be used to refine it (Björklund & Krueger, 2016;Guo et al, 2016), or results in the fact that an artefact dissolves or is retried in another context (Stritar & Drnovšek, 2016). However, that does not imply the imagination of entrepreneurs automatically lead to artefact emergence.…”