Investigating e-Market Evolution
ICCS '02 Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science-Part I
Entrepreneurial Intervention in an Electronic Market Place
IEA/AIE '02 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Industrial and engineering applications of artificial intelligence and expert systems: developments in applied artificial intelligence
Network Ties, Reputation, and the Financing of New Ventures
Management Science
Selling University Technology: Patterns from MIT
Management Science
Multistage Selection and the Financing of New Ventures
Management Science
Systematic search as a source of technical innovation: An empirical test
Journal of Engineering and Technology Management
Pre-Entry Knowledge, Learning, and the Survival of New Firms
Organization Science
A Good Riddance? Spin-Offs and the Technological Performance of Parent Firms
Organization Science
Cognitive Processes of Opportunity Recognition: The Role of Structural Alignment
Organization Science
Workplace Peers and Entrepreneurship
Management Science
Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge
Organization Science
Organizational Economics of Capability and Heterogeneity
Organization Science
Accidental Innovation: Supporting Valuable Unpredictability in the Creative Process
Organization Science
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Before technological change leads to new processes, products, markets, or ways of organizing, entrepreneurs must discover opportunities in which to exploit the new technology. To date, research has not explained adequately why entrepreneurs discover these opportunities, which creates several conceptual problems in the entrepreneurship literature. Drawing on Austrian economics, I argue that opportunity discovery is a function of the distribution of information in society (Hayek 1945). Through in-depth case studies of eight sets of entrepreneurs who exploit a single MIT invention, I show that entrepreneurs discover opportunities related to the information that they already possess. I use these findings to draw several implications that differ from those prevailing in the entrepreneurship literature, including: (1) entrepreneurs do not always select between alternative market opportunities for new technologies; (2) the source of entrepreneurship lies in differences in information about opportunities; (3) the results of prior studies of entrepreneurial exploitation may suffer from bias; and (4) individual differences influence the opportunities that people discover, how their entrepreneurial efforts are organized, and how the government can influence this process.