Suchergebnisse

1.2.8 Women and minority entrepreneurship -- 1.2.9 Global entrepreneurship -- 1.2.10 Entrepreneurship research, education, and pedagogy -- 1.3 Reflections about the main research themes in entrepreneurship studies -- 1.4 The structure of the book -- References -- Further reading -- 2 The performance of entrepreneurial firms -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Problems with prior research -- 2.2.1 Defining entrepreneurial firms -- 2.2.2 Refining the concept of performance achieved by entrepreneurial firms -- 2.2.3 Reviewing the factors that can affect the growth of entrepreneurial firms

This paper explores entrepreneurial opportunities among youth engaged in vending and hawking on the streets of Accra, Ghana. It ascertains challenges faced and strategies adopted to address them. Street vending and hawking is assuming increasing dimension due to paucity of formal job opportunities in Ghana. Hawking and vending of newspapers, textbooks, toffees and fruits are informal entrepreneurship opportunities on our streets. The study sought for short to medium and long-term plans the youth have to innovate the entrepreneurial opportunities in trades engaged in. It used youth hawkers operating at Okponglo and Dzorwulu junctions. Fifteen (15) youth participated in the study. It is a qualitative study which adopted purposive and convenience sampling procedures in selecting the sample. Thematic, analytical, descriptive-narrative interpretivist approaches were adopted in presenting the results. Crossing roads, chasing moving vehicles, operating in the scorching sun and torrential rain impacted negatively their health. It also emerged that the youth have plans to innovate and grow businesses, but the high cost of credit is a barrier. Lack of collateral for credits came up. Government quasi-financial institutions and non-bank financial institutions should be proactive in providing financial, advisory and technical support to the youth to exploit entrepreneurial opportunities in Ghana.

PurposeOpportunity recognition is an important aspect on entrepreneurship, especially for technology‐based ventures. Drawing on Austrian economic theory, recent studies have emphasized the importance of market knowledge in opportunity recognition. Although insightful, these studies do not take account of relationships that exist between different types of knowledge (e.g. technology and market knowledge). The authors aim to address this gap by integrating the Schumpeterian theory of opportunity development with Kirzner's theory of opportunity discovery to examine these relationships.Design/methodology/approachThe data consist of a longitudinal sample of 42 new biotechnology ventures from the USA, Finland, and Sweden.FindingsThe paper finds that both market knowledge and technological knowledge (measured as the number of patents) contribute to firms' subsequent recognition of entrepreneurial opportunities.Originality/valueThe results show the value and importance of early market knowledge and technological knowledge for subsequent opportunity recognition. The empirical findings are reflected in the light of current research on Kirznerian and Schumpeterian opportunity recognition.

This paper builds on opportunity-based conceptualisations of entrepreneurship that focus on the identification and exploitation of opportunities. The study investigates the importance of factors when evaluating opportunities andidentifies distinct clusters of preferences for differing opportunities. Based on a conjoint analysis where importances and part worth utilities were calculated when assessing an entrepreneurial opportunity, significant differences appear in the importances associated with the business sector, capital intensity, technology maturity, market potential and return on investment potential. Moreover clustering is dependent on gender, academic background and principal work experience of respondents. A holistic conclusion of this study confirms not only that both opportunity dimensions and demographic factors are important, but that identifying levels of differences and differences in the degree of importances with unique constellations therein, is fundamental in understanding opportunity evaluation. The study contributes to the clustering of different types of opportunities to ensure the effective targeting of policies and services by government. Empirical evidence is mounting which demonstrates that there are more entrepreneurial opportunities in developing countries and that the higher number of entrepreneurial opportunities and demand for entrepreneurship in developing countries is indeed matched by higher rates of opportunity-driven entrepreneurs entering the market.

Scandals are frequently considered as detrimental for involved businesses. When hotels serve as a backdrop and are collateral victims of scandals caused by high-profile individuals, we argue that entrepreneurially minded executives can envision scandals as an unexpected opportunity, likely to bring good news to the involved hotels. Tourism businesses offer supportive evidence. In a constructivist perspective, scandals and their consequences do not result from the transgression seriousness, but are socially constructed. Entrepreneurially minded individuals influence this social construction and seek to transform scandals into entrepreneurial opportunities. We analyse whether and how hospitality executives can channel the a priori destructive forces involved in a scandal eruption towards a direction aligned with their own interests. We identify three potential mechanisms by which hospitality executives can make the best of scandals, namely, by increasing exposure and attracting attention at a low cost, offering a basis for differentiation and innovation and generating useful marketing data. We identify some conditions that make this outcome more likely. Rather than just avoiding or containing the scandal consequences, we propose to equip hospitality executives with a scandal management plan that explicitly considers the bright side of scandals.