Essentials of Entrepreneurship exam november 4th, 2020
All articles
ARTICLE 1 The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research – Shane
and Venkataraman, 2000.
Most researchers have defined entrepreneurship in terms of who the entrepreneur is and what he or
she does. Two problems with this definition:
o It does not include the presence of lucrative opportunities.
o It does not include the presence of enterprising individuals.
Field of entrepreneurship: examines how, by whom and with what effects opportunities to create
future goods and services are discovered, evaluated, and exploited. This involves the study of sources
of opportunities: the processes of delivery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities and the set of
individuals who discover, evaluate and exploit them.
Three fundamental research questions:
o Why, when and how opportunities for the creation of goods come into existence.
o Why, when and how some people and not others discover and exploit these opportunities.
o Why, when and how different modes of action are used to exploit entrepreneurial
opportunities.
Some assumptions:
o When we argue that some people and not others engage in entrepreneurial opportunities,
this is not based on a stable characteristic. Instead, we describe the tendency of certain
people to respond to the cues of these opportunities.
o Entrepreneurship can include the creation of new organizations.
o The framework the authors made complements sociological and economic work in which
researchers have examined the population-level factors that influence firm creation.
o The framework also compliments research on the process of firm creation.
Entrepreneurial opportunities are those situations in which new goods, services, raw materials, and
organizing methods can be introduced and sold at greater than their cost of production.
Although recognition of entrepreneurial opportunities is a subjective process, the opportunities
themselves are objective phenomena that are not known to all parties at all times.
Drucker (1985) has described three different categories of opportunities:
1. The creation of new information, as occurs with the invention of new technologies
2. The exploitation of market inefficiencies that result from information asymmetry, as occurs
across time and geography
3. The reaction to shifts in the relative costs and benefits of alternative uses for resources, as
occurs with political, regulatory, or demographic changes.
An entrepreneurial discovery occurs when someone makes the conjecture that a set of resources is
not put to its "best use".
Entrepreneurship requires that people hold different beliefs about the value of resources for two
reasons
1. Entrepreneurship involves joint production, where several different re- sources have to be
brought together to create the new product or service. For the entrepreneur to obtain
control over these resources in a way that makes the opportunity profitable, his or her
conjecture about the accuracy of resource prices must differ from those of resource owners
and other potential entrepreneurs.
2. If all people (potential entrepreneurs) possessed the same entrepreneurial conjectures, they
would compete to capture the same entrepreneurial profit, dividing it to the point that the
incentive to pursue the opportunity was eliminated.
Research has suggested two broad categories of factors that influence the probability that particular
people will discover particular opportunities.
1. The possession of the prior information necessary to identify an opportunity.
2. The cognitive properties necessary to value it.
Information corridors: people all possess different stocks of information and these stocks influence
their ability to recognize particular opportunities. Sometimes a person has prior knowledge that is
complimentary to the new information, which triggers and entrepreneurial conjecture.
1
All articles
ARTICLE 1 The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research – Shane
and Venkataraman, 2000.
Most researchers have defined entrepreneurship in terms of who the entrepreneur is and what he or
she does. Two problems with this definition:
o It does not include the presence of lucrative opportunities.
o It does not include the presence of enterprising individuals.
Field of entrepreneurship: examines how, by whom and with what effects opportunities to create
future goods and services are discovered, evaluated, and exploited. This involves the study of sources
of opportunities: the processes of delivery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities and the set of
individuals who discover, evaluate and exploit them.
Three fundamental research questions:
o Why, when and how opportunities for the creation of goods come into existence.
o Why, when and how some people and not others discover and exploit these opportunities.
o Why, when and how different modes of action are used to exploit entrepreneurial
opportunities.
Some assumptions:
o When we argue that some people and not others engage in entrepreneurial opportunities,
this is not based on a stable characteristic. Instead, we describe the tendency of certain
people to respond to the cues of these opportunities.
o Entrepreneurship can include the creation of new organizations.
o The framework the authors made complements sociological and economic work in which
researchers have examined the population-level factors that influence firm creation.
o The framework also compliments research on the process of firm creation.
Entrepreneurial opportunities are those situations in which new goods, services, raw materials, and
organizing methods can be introduced and sold at greater than their cost of production.
Although recognition of entrepreneurial opportunities is a subjective process, the opportunities
themselves are objective phenomena that are not known to all parties at all times.
Drucker (1985) has described three different categories of opportunities:
1. The creation of new information, as occurs with the invention of new technologies
2. The exploitation of market inefficiencies that result from information asymmetry, as occurs
across time and geography
3. The reaction to shifts in the relative costs and benefits of alternative uses for resources, as
occurs with political, regulatory, or demographic changes.
An entrepreneurial discovery occurs when someone makes the conjecture that a set of resources is
not put to its "best use".
Entrepreneurship requires that people hold different beliefs about the value of resources for two
reasons
1. Entrepreneurship involves joint production, where several different re- sources have to be
brought together to create the new product or service. For the entrepreneur to obtain
control over these resources in a way that makes the opportunity profitable, his or her
conjecture about the accuracy of resource prices must differ from those of resource owners
and other potential entrepreneurs.
2. If all people (potential entrepreneurs) possessed the same entrepreneurial conjectures, they
would compete to capture the same entrepreneurial profit, dividing it to the point that the
incentive to pursue the opportunity was eliminated.
Research has suggested two broad categories of factors that influence the probability that particular
people will discover particular opportunities.
1. The possession of the prior information necessary to identify an opportunity.
2. The cognitive properties necessary to value it.
Information corridors: people all possess different stocks of information and these stocks influence
their ability to recognize particular opportunities. Sometimes a person has prior knowledge that is
complimentary to the new information, which triggers and entrepreneurial conjecture.
1
