Identifying opportunities is essential to successful entrepreneurial activity; but good opportunities may be missed if entrepreneurs fail to understand when and where to search for them, or appreciate the significance of timing and place in their search.
This book identifies and addresses three problems which face aspiring entrepreneurs. The first is finding a promising idea to exploit; the second is to know when to stop searching, or pursue a more promising search; and the third is to understand how the entrepreneur can locate him or herself in time and space to most economically locate a discovery. As well as developing original theories to solve these problems, this book offers practical solutions, which aspiring entrepreneurs can learn and implement through theory-based activities, giving them an opportunity to practice while gaining an understanding of both why and how these approaches work.
Showing how timing becomes more salient than time, and place more important than space, this book combines theoretical and practical guidance which will be of great interest to entrepreneurship researchers, educators, students and aspiring entrepreneurs.
Part 1: Searching 1. Entrepreneurial opportunities 2. Capturing timing and place 3. Informational economics and its role in positioning in time and space 4. Current conversations about opportunities 5. Constrained, systematic search 6. Still searching (systematically) the terrain for entrepreneurial opportunities Part 2: Positioning in time and space 7. The routinization of the discovery process 8. Entrepreneurial positioning 9. A notation for entrepreneurial positioning 10. Structural implications for entrepreneurship 11. The routine activities of habituated entrepreneurs Part 3: Stopping, starting and persuading 12. Guidelines for how to search in the Internet connected world of the twenty-first century 13. Acquiring and using gatekeeper information Part 4: Theory and pedagogy 14. The theoretical side of teaching entrepreneurship 15. The pedagogical side of entrepreneurship theory. Epilogue.
Biography
James O. Fiet holds the Brown-Forman Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of Louisville, USA. He is also the Director of its entrepreneurship PhD program.
