Knowledge search strategies and corporate entrepreneurship: evidence from China's high-tech firms

PurposeThis study aims to explore the impact of search breadth and depth on corporate entrepreneurship (CE) through the mediating effect of opportunity discovery under the consideration of the technological environmental dynamism as a moderating factor.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a quantitative method, collecting 246 questionnaires from high-tech firms in the national industrial park of the Yangtze River Delta zone in China. The authors examine the hypotheses using multiple hierarchical regressions and conduct Sobel and bootstrapping tests to further assess the mediating and moderated mediating effects of the variables.FindingsThe results indicate that both the relationship between search breadth and CE and the relationship between search depth and CE are mediated by opportunity discovery. The authors further show that technological environmental dynamism positively moderates the indirect effect of knowledge search breadth on CE and negatively moderates the indirect effect of knowledge search depth and CE.Originality/valueThis study provides a valuable theoretical framework for entrepreneurship literature by differentiating the effects of search depth and search breadth on the promotion of CE in established firms and pioneers the examination of the mediating role of opportunity discovery and the moderating role of technological environmental dynamism in these links as well.

The too-much-of-a-good-thing effect of new ventures' opportunity development on innovation strategy under the Chinese context

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to reveal how to improve the quality of entrepreneurship by exploring the key factor, opportunity development, impacting the innovation strategy of new ventures. It also introduces political and business ties as moderating variables to reveal the uniqueness of entrepreneurial activities in the Chinese context.Design/methodology/approachEmpirical data from 215 entrepreneurs and top executives in Chinese new ventures were gathered through a survey and the statistical method used is the regression model.FindingsThe empirical results indicate that: (1) new ventures' opportunity creation positively impacts innovation strategy, while opportunity discovery has a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) impact on innovation strategy; (2) the relationship between opportunity development and innovation strategy is moderated by political and business ties.Originality/valueThis research analyzes and compares the effect of opportunity discovery and opportunity creation on new ventures' innovation strategy. This research further offers an in-depth understanding of the influence mechanism between opportunity development and innovation strategy among Chinese new ventures. Further, the results provide practical guidance for new ventures to develop innovation strategies and for Chinese governments to make entrepreneurial policies.

Why (a Theory of) Opportunity Matters: Refining the Austrian View of Entrepreneurial Discovery

The concept of entrepreneurial opportunity has undergone a period of useful critique and refinement since Venkataraman (1997) and Shane and Venkataraman (2000) employed the term as one of the defining features of entrepreneurship studies. This paper presents a novel Austrian reinterpretation of this concept as an intersubjective phenomenon that emerges from the dual entrepreneurial process of discovery and judgment. Just as markets can be described as price discovery procedures for existing goods, services, and resources, entrepreneurship can be usefully described as a price discovery procedure for future goods, services, and resources. This view retains the essential elements of Kirzner’s (1973) approach while also refining the opportunity discovery concept within an evolutionary realist framework for understanding entrepreneurial motivation and action.

A Dynamic Model of Entrepreneurial Opportunity: Integrating Kirzner's and Mises's Approaches to Entrepreneurial Action.

We highlight the important role that time plays in conceptualizations of opportunity in entrepreneurship research. Through two longitudinal case studies, we introduce a more dynamic understanding of opportunities than portrayed by current theorizing, which tends to emphasize “opportunity discovery.” By adopting a dynamic temporal perspective, we integrate Kirzner’s and Mises’s approaches to entrepreneurial action to generate novel insights about how entrepreneurs view opportunities as initial opportunity beliefs, how these beliefs change over time, and how these changes help inform scholarly research of opportunities. We argue that taking the role of time into consideration opens up new questions related to opportunity and the dynamics of its development.

Passive, non-systematic search as an alternative to systematic search in opportunity discovery

This paper summarizes the results of a multiple-case study conducted to shed light into the question of how business opportunities are recognized by examining two theoretical propositions related to two topics: 1) the role of prior knowledge in the discovery of opportunities, and 2) whether opportunities are noticed without deliberate search or can be the object of a constrained, systematic search. We studied five Spanish companies and eight business opportunities. All the opportunities of the multiple-case study were recognized thanks to the prior knowledge of the entrepreneurs. In addition, the entrepreneurs only discovered opportunities related to their prior knowledge. None of the opportunities was discovered by noticing without search, as the alertness perspective contends. Some of them were the result of a systematic search constrained to the entrepreneur’s prior knowledge, but most of them were discovered by searching passively and non-systematically within the knowledge domain of the entrepreneur. This result suggests the passive, non-systematic search as an alternative to the systematic search.