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A Historical Intervention in the “Opportunity Wars”: Forgotten Scholarship, the Discovery/Creation Disruption, and Moving Forward by Looking Backward

A Historical Intervention in the “Opportunity Wars”: Forgotten Scholarship, the... 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.” http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice SAGE

A Historical Intervention in the “Opportunity Wars”: Forgotten Scholarship, the Discovery/Creation Disruption, and Moving Forward by Looking Backward

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References (109)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022
ISSN
1042-2587
eISSN
1540-6520
DOI
10.1177/10422587211069310
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

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.”

Journal

Entrepreneurship Theory and PracticeSAGE

Published: Jul 1, 2023

Keywords: opportunities; threats; entrepreneurial metatheory; strategic management; history; agency/structure; possibilism; positive thinking ideology

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