Perception and pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities: an evolutionary economics perspective

Guido Buenstorf ()

Papers on Economics and Evolution from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Evolutionary Economics Group

Abstract: Considerable debate surrounds the concept of entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper contributes to the discussion by bringing in concepts and findings from evolutionary economics. It makes three points. First, adopting an evolutionary market process perspective sheds new light on the nature of opportunities. Second, not only the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities, but also the further development of the entrepreneurial venture is dependent on subjective opportunity perception and interpretation. Third, findings on industry evolution help understand how opportunities, as well as agents’ ability and willingness to pursue them, change over time. Effects of pre-entry experience on opportunity recognition and firm performance are also discussed.

Keywords: opportunities; market process; business conceptions; industry evolution; spin-offs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B25 D21 M13 L10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-evo, nep-ino, nep-pke and nep-tid
Date: 2006-01
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://papers.econ.mpg.de/evo/discussionpapers/2006-01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:evopap:2006-01

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.econ.mpg. ... arch/EVO/discuss.php

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Economics and Evolution from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Evolutionary Economics Group
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Inken Poßner ().