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A Historical Intervention in the "Opportunity Wars": Forgotten Scholarship, the Discovery/Creation Disruption, and Moving Forward by Looking Backward
Univ Southampton, UK.
Linnaeus University, School of Business and Economics, Department of Management (MAN). Babson Coll, USA.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5863-9988
2023 (English)In: Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, ISSN 1042-2587, E-ISSN 1540-6520, Vol. 47, no 4, p. 1521-1538, article id 10422587211069310Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

There are two battles at the heart of the "opportunity wars": (1) Are opportunities discovered or created, and (2) Should we perhaps abandon the opportunity concept altogether? We argue that the first question is a pseudo-question, made possible by the loose use of "opportunity" in the discovery/creation debate during the last two decades. However, we refrain from going so far as to conclude that the opportunity concept should be abandoned altogether, since we observe that strategy and entrepreneurship scholarship prior to the 2000s made a more meaningful use of the concept. It alluded to the environmental conditions necessary for the actualization of desirable futures and hardly ever questioned the agent-independence of such conditions. Accordingly, we maintain that the opportunity concept should simply exit the blind alley created by the "discovery/creation" distraction and help reorient attention toward the agent-independent sources of opportunity and threat-beyond unrealistically optimistic views of entrepreneurship as an act of "opportunity discovery" and/or "opportunity creation."

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage Publications, 2023. Vol. 47, no 4, p. 1521-1538, article id 10422587211069310
Keywords [en]
opportunities, threats, entrepreneurial metatheory, strategic management, history, agency, structure, possibilism, positive thinking ideology
National Category
Business Administration
Research subject
Economy, Ledarskap, entreprenörskap och organisation
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-110871DOI: 10.1177/10422587211069310ISI: 000765236900001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85126011505OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-110871DiVA, id: diva2:1645617
Available from: 2022-03-18 Created: 2022-03-18 Last updated: 2025-01-09Bibliographically approved

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Gartner, William B.

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