A general theory of entrepreneurship, the individual-opportunity nexus by Scott Andrew Shane

Résumé du document

Although entrepreneurship concerns a large part of the working population, contributes to the economic growth in an important way and has proved to be of interest to a great percentage of the academic world, there hasn't yet been a complete study that develops every aspect of this issue (the actors, the skills needed and the environment). "Entrepreneurship is an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organizing, markets, processes, and raw materials through organizing efforts that previously had not existed". Moreover, it is important to establish the difference between entrepreneurship as self-employment and entrepreneurship as the founding of a new business. While, for one, the action is in pursuit of making one's own profit as opposed to receiving a salary from someone else, for the other the concept of profit is less important than the idea of developing something that has never existed before

Extraits

[...] The more the gap between the expected value and the alternative use of their time is large, the more the willingness to exploit en entrepreneurial opportunity will be strong. Opportunity cost is influenced by two main factors: income and unemployment. In fact, the higher the income, the lower the chances that the opportunity will be exploited. In the same way, unemployed people are more likely to catch an entrepreneurial opportunity than those who already have a job, even if the chances decrease when a person receives benefits during her unemployed period. [...]

[...] As we mentioned before, making the decision of exploiting an opportunity is also influenced by demographic factors. Because taking the chance of making profit out of an innovating idea is uncertain, some demographic characteristics affect the individual uncertainty premium. For example, the fact that the individual is married and the spouse earns a salary lowers the uncertainty premium and fosters the exploitation of an opportunity. For what is more, a person will be more likely to exploit an entrepreneurial opportunity if she has a better education. [...]

[...] Representativeness is willingness to generalize from small samples that do not represent a population” and because entrepreneurs take decisions with very little proof, this characteristic encourages entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation. Eventually, intuition is, according to Schumpeter, what an entrepreneur should fund his decisions on, as opposed to analysed information Industry differences in entrepreneurial activity The industry contest also influences entrepreneurial opportunity taking, as it is directly link with firm foundations. In fact, some industries such as agriculture or finance are more likely to foster firm foundations as well as to give more performing growth rates than others do. [...]

[...] Through advertising, entrepreneurs can keep the monopole of the opportunity because customers become suspicious towards other offers. He can also decide to give coupons to his clients: if imitators want to enter the market they will have to compete with the discounts that fidelity gives to the customers that by the original product or service. The entrepreneur can also concentrate on his brand's reputation, through marketing oriented strategies that by the way are proved more efficient in protecting from imitators than other strategies like the one based on competitive prices. [...]

[...] All these skills obviously lead to a better and easier exploitation of the entrepreneurial opportunity and to a higher growth of the activity. Risk taking takes different forms in the entrepreneurial process: market risk, competitive risk, technical risk People with higher propensity to risk and with higher tolerance towards ambiguity are more likely to exploit an opportunity. Finally, research has proved that the desire of independence is one of the main reasons why entrepreneurs decide to catch an opportunity. The desire of independence means that an individual is more likely to do and decide things by himself, which leads to the fact that it is more difficult for them to tie strong relationship with the people he collaborates with. [...]