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A. Appendix
5. Conclusions
The Role of Prior Knowledge in the Process of Recognizing Entrepreneurial Opportunities DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94161
experienced, however, should channel their analyses towards a smaller thematic area that has opportunities that focus on the experiences and knowledge that come from their past.
Finally, another conclusion derived from this profile of entrepreneurs is that, in contrast to the great intensity presented by those who have low cognitive struc- tures as a result of their professional experiences, they usually recognize a smaller number of opportunities and consequently the process is less intense. This is what the extracts from the interviews transcribed below show:
There were not a lot of businesses that I thought about establishing, and they always were in some way related to my work experience [...]. (Entrepreneur D).
In fact, I was in the insurance industry for many years. Even though I spent some time in advertising, my origin and my major interest was in the insurance market... I used to know the market. I had a lot of relationships in it. I knew the problems and I was already imagining an ideal business model... As a result, I looked on this market more kindly, and it was natural for me to decide to set up an insurance broker, with a focus and the differentials that I thought were ideal (Entrepreneur G).
I worked my whole professional life in the building management (condominium) area. I started in a large company and then I set up my own company... I began to get interested in technology, which is when I imagined that the operation I knew well could be automated by way of a web application environment... That was basically the only opportunity I identified (Entrepreneur J).
Entrepreneurship - Contemporary Issues
10
Author details
Felipe Baeta and Tales Andreassi*
FGV EAESP, Brazil
*Address all correspondence to: [email protected]
Another conclusion was the fact that in the process of recognizing an opportu- nity those entrepreneurs who had had less time in their professional careers attribute the relevance of their prior knowledge to their educational activities.
Along these same lines, entrepreneurs who have little professional experience present a very wide field of opportunities, making it clear that they have little detailed knowledge of a particular sector or industry. This can be justified by the fact that experiences that originate from formal education are much less restric- tive than professional experiences. These same entrepreneurs are endowed with enormous intensity when it comes to the process of recognizing opportunities; in other words, business ideas that become opportunities and potential ventures are constantly emerging.
On the other hand, those entrepreneurs with greater and better constructed work experience, both in an industry and in a functional position, have less scope;
in other words, in most cases they direct their past experiences to a connected and very narrow thematic horizon. These entrepreneurs also have a less intense opportu- nity recognition process, which is directly justified by the fact that the possibilities in terms of thematic fields are narrower.
The limitations of this study are, in particular, the potential correlation that exists between robust professional experiences and the age of the entrepreneur.
In other words, the question remains as to how much their deliberation in terms of their little professional experience is based on the limitations of their profes- sional experiences, or on their age, in view of the little time they have had to form a stronger set of experiences.
As a suggestion for future research, there is a need for a detailed study of the interactions, not only between the domains of prior knowledge, but of other variables that try to explain the differences in the ability to recognize an entrepre- neurial opportunity.
© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The Role of Prior Knowledge in the Process of Recognizing Entrepreneurial Opportunities DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94161
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Chapter
International Entrepreneurship:
An Entrepreneurial Behavior Oriented to the Pursuit of
International Opportunities
Alexander Tabares
Abstract
International entrepreneurship (IE) research draws on the notion that internationalization is an entrepreneurial behavior oriented to the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities across national borders to create value and get a competitive advantage. Based on the clear emphasis on opportunity-focused behaviors, IE research has made progress and extended its domain and boundaries to an extent that the mechanisms operating throughout the international opportunity process can be described. The present chapter aims to depict antecedents, mechanisms, and outcomes of this entrepreneurial behavior oriented to the pursuit of international opportunities and it offers directions for future research. As such, the chapter makes four contributions.
First, it outlines antecedents at three levels (individual, firm, and environ- mental) as driving aspects that lead to the international opportunity-related behavior. Second, it reveals the mechanism by which different actors discover, enact, evaluate, and exploit international opportunities. Third, it describes the outcomes of this opportunities process. Fourth, it suggests establishing a con- ceptual basis around one previously proposed definition incorporating a notion of a social context that would enable IE scholarly community to set the objective criteria around opportunities and go beyond the legal entity of the focal firm and consider multiple actors, resources, processes, history, and context. Finally, the chapter offers some theoretical contributions by proposing directions for future research.
Keywords: international entrepreneurship, international opportunities, opportunity discovery, opportunity creation, international performance
1. Introduction
International entrepreneurship (IE) is an intersectional domain [1, 2] combining international business and entrepreneurship areas of knowledge. The IE field emerged in the early 1990s when different studies indicated that some small and young new ventures could go into international markets from inception at their early years [3], which was different from the traditional Uppsala perspective which
Entrepreneurship - Contemporary Issues
argued that firms, especially multinationals, could become international following a specific-regular, slow, and evolutionary process to become international. Thus, this early and rapid internationalization theoretical framework challenged the validity of the Uppsala model prevailing so far, and it opened avenues for IE research to study and focus on features of early internationalizing firms and their innovative and new internationalization process [4, 5]. Consequently, most IE research concentrated on studying the internationalization of newly founded ventures that are necessarily small and young and it restricted for years the study of bigger companies [2].
Nonetheless, over the last years, IE research has moved on toward studying a variety of internationalization entrepreneurial behaviors [2, 6] of different actors—
organizations, groups, or individuals [7]; and then, it has considered not only the entrepreneurial behaviors of small and young firms but also the entrepreneurial behaviors of large and established companies [2]. Hence, IE has evolved over the years, and it has incorporated progressively new insights that address the field as a behavioral process of pursuing opportunities across national borders [2, 8–12] to create value and get a competitive advantage [2, 12].
In the evolving IE field, different definitions have determined common concep- tual elements suggesting that the IE field implies a dynamic process or behavior of discovering, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities across national borders to achieve value creation to different stakeholders [2]. First, McDougall and Oviatt [13] defined IE as a combination of innovative, proactive, and risk-seeking behavior that crosses national borders and is intended to create value in business organiza- tions. Then, Zahra and George [12] defined IE as the process of creatively discover- ing and exploiting opportunities that lie outside a firm’s domestic markets in the pursuit of competitive advantage. Afterward, Dimitratos and Plakoyiannaki [14]
defined IE as an organizational-wide process that is embedded in the organizational culture of the firm and which seeks through the exploitation of opportunities in the international marketplace to generate value. Next, Oviatt and McDougall [7]
defined IE as the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportuni- ties—across national borders—to create future goods and services. Later, Styles and Seymour [11] defined IE as the behavioral processes associated with the creation and exchange of value through the identification and exploitation of opportunities that cross-national borders. Afterward, Zahra et al. [15] defined IE as the discovery, formation, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities across national borders to create new businesses, models, and solutions for value creation, including financial, social, and environmental. Finally, Tabares, et al. [2] defined IE as the socially constructed behavioral processes associated with the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities across national borders to create new businesses, models, and solutions for value creation, including financial, social, and environmental.
Based on the clear emphasis on opportunity-focused behaviors, IE research has made progress and extended its domain and boundaries to an extent that the mechanisms operating throughout the international opportunity process can be described [2]. In this sense, the international opportunity process has been described as a dynamic and iterative phenomenon [2] that develops over time and interacts with the outside world [2, 16, 17] in a complex system that embraces numerous dimensions and various levels (individual, firm, and environment) [2, 18, 19]. Over the years, IE research has also depicted antecedents, mecha- nisms, and outcomes of this entrepreneurial behavior oriented to the pursuit of international opportunities [2, 20].
3
International Entrepreneurship: An Entrepreneurial Behavior Oriented to the Pursuit…
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93675
2. Antecedents influencing the international opportunities process