Introduction

Abstract

Entrepreneurship research is an expansive enterprise. Due to the increasing importance of entrepreneurship for value creation and economic development, researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines have invested their energy within the confine of entrepreneurship. All activities involved in the entrepreneurial processes are associated with the exploration or exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. Entrepreneurial opportunities are those situations that entrepreneurs meet a market need through a creative combination of resources in the form of new goods, services, raw materials, and organizing methods (Schumpeter 1934; Kirzner 1973; Casson 1982). They differ from the larger set of all opportunities for profit because they require the discovery of new means–ends relationships (Venkataraman 1997) or a change of mental schema (Gaglio and Katz 2001). The means–ends framework reflects people’s perceptions of how certain outcomes (e.g., economic growth, name recognition, or market position) and the methods (e.g., capitalization, choice of creative elements, marketing strategies) used to achieve them are connected with each other in a certain field. Schemas are dynamic, evolving mental models that represent an individual’s knowledge and beliefs about how physical and social worlds work (Gaglio and Katz 2001).