I did not write this essay:

The Sources of Entrepreneurial Opportunities: Individuals & the Environment

Doctoral Research Paper
2 of 5

Nikolina Fuduric

Doctoral Supervisor: Professor Anne Lorentzen

February 2008
Department of Planning and Development
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark

1.0 INTRODUCTION

No extensive empirical study on the sources of entrepreneurial opportunities included the individual, the environment and the individual’s start-up activities in a post-socialist periphery. However, such layered approaches have been encouraged in theoretical studies of entrepreneurship. Bouchikhi (1993) claims that each approach taken separately has crucial weaknesses and neither the personality of the entrepreneur nor the structural characteristics of the environment illuminate the process. Thus, multi-leveled studies have been encouraged in research programs (Low & MacMillan, 1988). In my previous paper, I attempted to examine the different forms of entrepreneurship by using the interplay between individual personality traits and capabilities and the institutional environment.

The goal of this paper is to examine the sources of entrepreneurial opportunities from the perspective of individual and environmental factors. Since opportunities define how the entrepreneur behaves and what kinds of entrepreneurship are manifested, entrepreneurial opportunity discovery and exploitation are two integral parts of the entrepreneurial process.[1] The field of entrepreneurship has two general perspectives on entrepreneurial types and the sources of entrepreneurial opportunities: the Schumpeterian and the Kirznerian perspectives. Schumpeter saw the entrepreneurial opportunity anchored in the alpha individuals of society who are responsible through their superior capabilities of