Entrepreneurial Intention and Opportunity Development

Venture creation goes in hand with assembling and combining necessary resources and with establishing the required structures and procedures. Scholarly work has been looking at venture creation as an entrepreneurial process. Research on the venture creation process that includes the investigation of the triad of entrepreneurial intentions, opportunity development, and entrepreneurial action can be regarded as a key element in researching entrepreneurship as such, and it has dominated the field for several decades. Whereas an intention is the starting point, precedent, or necessary condition of entrepreneurial action as a deliberate choice, the prediction of entrepreneurial action from an (earlier) intention is not trivial. In other words, entrepreneurial intentions can only explain part of the variation of entrepreneurial action. Therefore, the strength of an (earlier) intention cannot be the only predictor of entrepreneurial action, which has led to the term “intention action-gap” in entrepreneurship research. There is no venture creation without action. Entrepreneurial action can be seen as the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Therefore, it is closely linked to the body of research on entrepreneurial opportunities. As entrepreneurship is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, entrepreneurial action, as well as the development of entrepreneurial opportunities need to be seen as varying over time. Hence, a time dimension needs to be considered here as well.