Beyond the single-person, single-insight attribution in understanding entrepreneurial opportunities.

This article helps develop the creativity perspective within entrepreneurship in two ways. First, it elaborates on the nature of opportunity as a creative product. Rather than viewing opportunities as single insights, it suggests that they are emerging through the continuous shaping and development of (raw) ideas that are acted upon. Second, rather than attributing them to a particular individual, it highlights the contextual and social influences that affect the generation and shaping of ideas. This helps move entrepreneurship research beyond the single-person, single-insight attribution that currently permeates it.

Introduction

There is a well-known phenomenon in social psychology--the fundamental attribution error--whereby in judging the behavior and deeds of others, people typically underestimate the power of situations and situational pressures, and thus ascribe what they see to individual strengths or weaknesses (Ross, 1977). When we talk and think about (great) entrepreneurs, the fundamental attribution error is evident in our tendency to praise their individual characteristics or skills and overlook the enabling force of their environment. To some extent, the recognition of opportunities--especially those that are ultimately considered great, radical, creative, etc.--is an area of research especially prone to the fundamental attribution error. Indeed, in the spirit of the great, visionary deeds that Schumpeter (1934) ascribes to his entrepreneur-innovator, the search for the mind that produces these earth-shattering ideas is ever appealing and thus never ending.

Entrepreneurship is not the only field interested in the origin of great ideas. Neither is it the most advanced. The study of creativity, "the production of novel and useful ideas by an individual or small group of individuals working together" (Amabile, 1996, p. 1155) represents a long and advanced tradition in social and cognitive psychology (e.g., Glover, Ronning, & Reynolds, 1989; Sternberg, 1999). Nevertheless, its utility for the study of opportunities as great entrepreneurial ideas is not a matter of simple application due to several conceptual challenges that the context of entrepreneurship poses. It would be naive to think that business ideas--the way we know them in our post hoc admiration of them--are originally conceived in the same shape and form; rather, they emerge in an iterative process of shaping and development. In addition, it is unrealistic to presume that individuals develop their ideas in isolation; rather, as potential entrepreneurs seek to convince, engage, or organize other social actors, this is a social process of discussion and interpretation. I refer to this process of shaping, discussion, and interpretation, whereby initial ideas are elaborated, refined, changed, or even discarded, as opportunity development. This term represents both a dynamic, iterative, and a socially embedded view of how entrepreneurial opportunities reach their final form. The dynamic, iterative aspect of this pertains to the gradual "polishing" of what is initially an unpolished idea. The socially embedded aspect pertains to the fact that potential entrepreneurs, rather than thinking and acting alone, are actively engaged in information and value exchange with a surrounding community. In order to systematically and rigorously study opportunity development, one needs to (1) capture its ephemeral beginning and fragile sustenance in order to avoid survival bias, (2) reconcile the positivist and constructivist accounts of the nature of opportunities, and (3) incorporate the involvement of stakeholders beyond the individual entrepreneur (Davidsson, 2003; Dutta & Crossan, 2005; Gartner, Carter, & Hills, 2003).

The purpose of this article is to establish new conceptual ground for the study of entrepreneurial opportunities by emphasizing their (gradual) development and by producing a constructive synthesis of ideas from the fields of creativity and entrepreneurship. A brief review of the entrepreneurship literature reveals that while there is some knowledge of the creative person and process, elaboration of the creative product and situation is lacking. The article tries to fill this gap in two ways. On one hand, it discusses how one of the most potent features of entrepreneurship--the presence of uncertainty and the need to act in its face--requires a reconceptualization of the nature of the creative product in entrepreneurship. Rather than being single insights, entrepreneurial opportunities pertain to a series of insights--reinforcing, modifying, or contradicting each other--emerging as one acts to resolve the uncertainty. On the other hand, it emphasizes that situational and social influences continuously affect--by directing attention, providing new information and interpretations, reinforcing beliefs, etc.--the potential entrepreneur's knowledge of the developing opportunity. Rather than being the deed of a single person, entrepreneurial opportunities encompass a social, learning process whereby new knowledge continuously emerges to resolve the uncertainty inherent to each stage of opportunity development.

The article contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by introducing a conception of opportunities that goes beyond the single-person, single-insight explanation, thereby expanding the scope for developing entrepreneurship theory. Opportunities can be represented as a stream of continuously developed ideas, driven and shaped by one's social interaction, creative insights, and action at each stage. The article is structured as follows. In the next section, it discusses the interactionist perspective as a framework for both conceptualizing extant entrepreneurship research and highlighting important conceptual gaps. In the following two sections, it develops propositions on the nature of opportunities as a creative product and the processes behind social and contextual influences. Finally, it discusses the implications of these propositions for future research.

Creativity in Entrepreneurship

One of the central ideas in the broader creativity literature is that explaining creativity necessitates a conceptual constellation of four factors--person, process, product, and situation--as well as their interaction (Brown, 1989; Harrington, 1990). The complexity of the interaction between a person and a given situation is represented by Woodman and Schoenfeldt's (1989, 1990) interactionist model of creativity. Although the individual faces the situation with an arsenal of antecedent skills and predispositions--knowledge, cognitive skills, and noncognitive traits--the situation may further facilitate or inhibit the individual's creative accomplishment. This implies that, if we studied the two elements in isolation, there would be a large unexplained component remaining.

One of the central questions in entrepreneurship seeks to understand why some individuals and not others recognize certain opportunities (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). This question has naturally made the application of a creativity perspective appropriate for understanding opportunity recognition. Yet, regrettably, it has also induced a predominant focus on who the opportunity "recognizers" are and how they think or what they do (i.e., creative person and process).

The Creative Person in Entrepreneurship

There are four factors that have been established as instrumental for understanding the individuality of creativity--personality, intrinsic motivation, knowledge, and cognitive skills and abilities (Amabile, 1996; Woodman & Schoenfeldt, 1989, 1990). As the following brief review shows, these factors also have a well-established recognition in entrepreneurship research.

Personality. The quest for understanding how entrepreneurs differ from the general population in terms of various personality characteristics is one of the oldest research traditions in entrepreneurship and mirrors similar infatuations with the personality of great creative persons (e.g., Simonton, 1986) or great leaders (Yukl, 1989). Despite criticisms of this trait paradigm (e.g., Gartner, 1989), it is now well accepted that personality remains an important general predictor of entrepreneurial behavior, once specific mediating factors are considered (Baum, Locke, & Smith, 2001; Rauch & Frese, 2000). There are several factors that have been of greatest interest to researchers: need for achievement, locus of control, risk propensity, and tolerance for ambiguity (e.g., Begley & Boyd, 1987; Brockhaus, 1982; McCleiland, 1961; Shaver & Scott, 1991), as well as, more recently, self-efficacy and the Big 5 personality factors (Ciavarella, Buchholtz, Riordan, Gatewood, & Stokes, 2004; Krueger, Reilly, & Carsrud, 2000; Markman, Balkin, & Baron, 2002). In the context of mixed results, methodological issues, and diverse samples, recent meta-analyses and reflections on this work have emphasized the need (1) to separate the emergence and success of entrepreneurs, (2) to search for more proximate or mediating predictors of specific behaviors, (3) to take into consideration situational demands, and (4) to acknowledge the inherent diversity among entrepreneurs (Rauch & Frese, 2000; Stewart & Roth, 2001). Points 1 and 3 consistently resonate throughout this brief review and serve to highlight the issues related to the nature and development of opportunities explored in the next two sections.