The unit of analysis in entrepreneurship research : opportunities or investments?
Abstract
The entrepeneurship literature in management focuses increasingly on opportunities — their
creation or discovery, evaluation, and exploitation — as the unit of analysis. We argue first,
that the opportunity perspective emerged from the “functional” literature in the economics of
entrepreneurship (mainly the works of Israel Kirzner), a literature that emphasizes not the in-
dividual entrepreneur per se, but the functions (e.g., market clearing) that entrepreneurs under-
take in a market economy; second, that most notions of entrepreneurship in economics and
management are not easily integrated into the theory of the firm; third, that the popular em-
phasis on opportunity discovery tends to direct attention from opportunity exploitation; and
fourth, that the Cantillon-Mises-Knight view of entrepreneurship as judgment links more na-
turally with the economic theory of the firm.
Publisher
Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Department of Strategy and ManagementSeries
Discussion paper2008:3