Developing venture opportunities amidst rivalry: entrepreneurs’ backgrounds and the governing role of maintaining confidence
Benjamin Fath,
Hugh Whittaker and
Antje Fiedler
Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 2021, vol. 33, issue 7-8, 641-667
Abstract:
This qualitative, longitudinal study of 12 innovative young New Zealand ventures investigates how individual entrepreneurs develop their venture opportunity amidst emerging rivalry. Two phases are identified: the pursuit of the initial opportunity, and developing it under rivalry. Adopting a sensemaking perspective and a social understanding of rivalry, we explain how entrepreneurs’ backgrounds impact opportunity confidence and the construction of rivalry, and reveal three main pathways whereby entrepreneurs develop their venture. First, entrepreneurs with neither start-up experience nor industry knowledge construct rivalry as threatening and narrow their network as opportunity confidence declines. Second, entrepreneurs with industry knowledge construct emerging rivalry as a challenge and strengthen within-industry ties to meet it. Third, entrepreneurs with serial start-up experience remain unfazed by rivalry and may abandon existing networks in favour for new networks. Comparing pathways, the paper makes two main contributions. First, it illustrates a link between entrepreneurs’ backgrounds and the construction of rivalry. This construction impacts opportunity confidence. Second, the paper suggests that such changes in opportunity confidence guide decisions about how to embed the venture into social context. Overall, the paper contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms whereby entrepreneurial backgrounds influence developing venture opportunities in competitive settings.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/08985626.2021.1886332 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:entreg:v:33:y:2021:i:7-8:p:641-667
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TEPN20
DOI: 10.1080/08985626.2021.1886332
Access Statistics for this article
Entrepreneurship & Regional Development is currently edited by Professor Alistair Anderson
More articles in Entrepreneurship & Regional Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().