THE OPPORTUNITy-BASED APPROAcH TO ENTREPRENEURIAl DIScOVERy RESEARcH

It is almost a truism in entrepreneurship research that the entrepreneurial process begins most basically with the discovery of opportunities (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). Entrepreneurship scholars have also noted that opportunities have distinctive conceptual properties (Venkataraman, 1997). Even so, it has gone almost unnoticed that the basic and distinctive nature of opportunities calls for a novel research approach (Eckhardt & Shane, 2003). Most of the entrepreneurship research emphasizing opportunities relies heavily on theory and method from other content areas in the social sciences and the domain of business studies. Opportunities elude the usual theoretic structures in those areas, which has hindered unique theoretic advancements. In this chapter, we articulate underpinnings of a distinct theoretic direction for entrepreneurial discovery research. Our undertaking constitutes an introduction to what we call the opportunity-based approach (OBA). Though the entrepreneurial process begins with opportunities, it entails other important elements. Such elements include assembling resources, managing a going concern, growing a business venture, and others. The OBA is not intended to apply to those elements, which entail different kinds of phenomena, but only to opportunities in nascent stages. As such, the approach we articulate can lead to hypotheses about opportunities, but it cannot represent a paradigm for all entrepreneurship research. We intend it to be a middle-range theory (Merton, 1967, p. 39) circumscribed to entrepreneurial discovery. We will emphasize