Opportunities, organizations, and entrepreneurship

• Author: Sharon A. Alvarez,Jay B. Barney
• Published date: 01 December 2008
• Date: 01 December 2008
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.61

Copyright © 2009 Strategic Management Society

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 265–267 (2008)

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej.61

OPPORTUNITIES, ORGANIZATIONS,

AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

SHARON A. ALVAREZ* and JAY B. BARNEY

Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, Columbus,

Ohio, U.S.A.

In an infl uential 1989 article, Karl Weick described

the theory development process as an exercise in

disciplined imagination (Weick, 1989). Building on

Campbell’s (1974) notion of theory development as

ideational trial and error, Weick argued that effec-

tive theorists engage in imaginary experiments—

what Einstein called thought experiments (Isaacson,

2007) that suggest possible explanations of a par-

ticular phenomena or issue at hand. These experi-

ments are then evaluated by the theorist for their

logical completeness and broader empirical implica-

tions until, through an evolutionary process, a

particular explanation emerges as both robust and

generalizable.

Certainly, research on the relationship between

opportunities and entrepreneurship has followed the

evolutionary path described by Weick (1989). Tra-

ditionally, these thought experiments focused on two

distinct types of opportunities—those created by

price discrepancies within a market (Kirzner, 1979;

Miller, 2007) and those created by exogenous shocks

to existing industries (Shane, 2003). A great deal of

theoretical and empirical work has focused on under-

standing and expanding the implications of these

two thought experiments.

More recently, a different thought experiment

about opportunities and entrepreneurship has begun

to emerge. Building on an evolutionary approach to

entrepreneurship (Aldrich and Ruef, 2006; Baker

and Nelson, 2005) this approach to the study of

entrepreneurship suggests that traditional decision-

making tools may not always be applicable in

exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities (Sarasvathy,

2001). In this creation thought experiment (Alvarez

and Barney, 2007) opportunities can be formed

endogenously by entrepreneurs themselves. Work is

only now beginning to examine the theoretical and

empirical implications of this thought experiment

about entrepreneurial opportunities.

In this sense, this special issue—and the last—can

be seen as an effort by a wide variety of scholars to

try to come to some understanding about these three

ways of thinking about opportunities, each of their

implications, and—most importantly—the relation-

ships among them. There is little doubt that debates

about these three ways of thinking about opportuni-

ties will continue for some time—debates that are

likely to benefi t the fi eld of entrepreneurship for

many years.

In this issue, these debates are joined by a distin-

guished group of scholars. The fi rst article, by

Luksha, Niche construction: the process of opportu-

nity creation in the environment suggests that one

way that entrepreneurs can create opportunities is

to transform the institutional environments within

which they operate. In a sense, Luksha ends up sug-

gesting that the endogenous acts of entrepreneurs

to change their environments can have the effect of

creating exogenous shocks to the markets within

which they operate.

The second article by Hmieleski and Baron, Regu-

latory focus and new venture performance: a study

of entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation under

*Correspondence to: Sharon A. Alvarez, Fisher College of

Business, The Ohio State University, 2100 Neil Avenue #850,

Columbus, OH 43210, U.S.A. E-mail: Alvarez_42@cob.osu.

edu