Hayek actually concluded his classic paper on the role of knowledge in society by explicitly attacking Schumpeter and his assertion that entrepreneurship can be seen as systematic discovery of objectively existing opportunities. Writes Hayek: “To him [Schumpeter] these phenomena accordingly appear as objectively given quantities of commodities impinging directly upon each other, almost, it would seem, without any intervention of human minds.”

This is, according to Hayek, completely mistaken and the mistake rests on an inability to appreciate the tacitness and incompleteness of each individual’s knowledge (i.e. subjectivism), and the implications this has for the market qua process

Hayek claimed to be startled that: “an economist of Professor Schumpeter’s standing should thus have fallen into a trap which the ambiguity of the term ‘datum’ sets to the unwary”, because like any approach: “which in effect starts from the assumption that people’s knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, [it] systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem” (Hayek 1945: 91).

In light of recent debates, regarding the ontological status of opportunities, many contemporary entrepreneurship scholars might benefit greatly from reading Hayek’s work, even if it does not focus on entrepreneurship per se.