New Issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

3 November 2008 at 10:22 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Volume 2, number 3 of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, a special issue edited by Sharon Alvarez and Jay Barney on “Opportunities, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship,” is now out. It features my paper “Opportunity Discovery, Entrepreneurial Action, and Economic Organization,” Nicolai’s paper with Kirsten Foss, “Understanding Opportunity Discovery and Sustainable Advantage: The Role of Transaction Costs and Property Rights,” and several others of interest. The abstracts from my paper and the Foss & Foss paper are below the fold.

Opportunity discovery, entrepreneurial action, and economic organization

Peter G. Klein^*

Division of Applied Social Sciences and McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, U.S.A.

email: Peter G. Klein (kleinp@missouri.edu)

^*Correspondence to Peter G. Klein, Division of Applied Social Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, U.S.A.

opportunity discovery • alertness • judgment • Austrian economics • property rights • capital structure

This article reviews and critiques the opportunity discovery approach to entrepreneurship and argues that entrepreneurship can be more thoroughly grounded, and more closely linked to more general problems of economic organization by adopting the Cantillon-Knight-Mises understanding of entrepreneurship as judgment. The article begins by distinguishing among occupational, structural, and functional approaches to entrepreneurship and distinguishing among two influential interpretations of the entrepreneurial function – discovery and judgment. It turns next to the contemporary literature on opportunity identification and argues that this literature misinterprets Kirzner’s instrumental use of the discovery metaphor and mistakenly makes opportunities the unit of analysis. The article then describes an alternative approach in which investment is the unit of analysis and link this approach to Austrian capital theory. I close with some applications to organizational form and entrepreneurial teams.

Understanding opportunity discovery and sustainable advantage: the role of transaction costs and property rights

Kirsten Foss^*, Nicolai J. Foss

Department of Strategy and Management, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and Center for Strategic Management and Globalization, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

email: Kirsten Foss (Kirsten.Foss@nhh.no)

^*Correspondence to Kirsten Foss, Department of Strategy and Management, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Breiviksveien 40, 5045, Bergen, Norway

opportunity discovery • sustainable advantage • transaction costs • property rights • the resource-based view • knowledge

To add insight in new value creation, opportunity discovery should be integrated with strategic management theory. Based on the resource-based view and the economics of property rights, we build a framework that accomplishes this. Our key argument is that property rights and transaction costs are important antecedents of opportunity discovery. We identify two mechanisms that establish this influence and examine alternative ways in which knowledge, transaction costs, and property rights influence opportunity discovery and sustainable advantage.