Westgren on Entrepreneurial Opportunities
12 July 2014 at 6:50 pm Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
My colleague Randy Westgren has two thoughtful posts on entrepreneurial opportunities (1, 2). Randy shares my unease with the construct of opportunity, which began as a metaphor introduced by Israel Kirzner, only to be reified by entrepreneurship scholars looking for a central organizing construct. My own view is that the concept of opportunity is redundant at best, misleading at worst. Randy expresses the same idea: “If the opportunity is so important to the entrepreneurial process, why are there so many mediating actions and decisions between the existence and the outcomes? How much of the outcomes does the existence of the opportunity explain?” He goes on to propose some useful taxonomies for making sense of the literature. More to come.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Austrian Economics, Entrepreneurship, Myths and Realities.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
Divine Economy Consulting | 12 July 2014 at 7:09 pm
Opportunities are only relevant in the context of entrepreneurship when it is realized that entrepreneurship is either latent or active. If an individual is in a condition of latent entrepreneurship the presence of opportunity translates into an absence of entrepreneurial action.