infonet-economy

In addition to fostering lively theoretical debates, research on opportunity identification continues to face thorny methodological challenges. Amongst the most salient is the difficulty to estimate theoretically-relevant differences between opportunity ideas early on, before entrepreneurs’ efforts provide evidence that an opportunity idea is worthwhile or not. Addressing this puzzle remains an important step for advancing scholarly understanding of the motivational dynamics by which, in the very early stages of entrepreneurial pursuits, some individuals get sufficiently excited by the prospects of some ideas to examine them further and continue their entrepreneurial efforts. To help foster research in this area, we revisit prior measures and develop a new and augmented set of items. We then conduct a series of studies to validate these items’ effectiveness in capturing meaningful differences between early-stage assessment beliefs of different opportunity ideas.

Methods

We first conducted a thorough literature review to identify studies that measure respondents’ early perceptions of opportunity ideas. Building on these studies, we developed additional candidate items and pre-tested these with two panels of 21 undergraduate students and 10 industry experts engaged in a series of brainstorming exercises to identify potential applications for a new technology. We then deployed our reduced set of candidate items in a survey conducted with nascent entrepreneurs in Switzerland, and which follows the PSED protocol.

Results and Implications

Results from 262 completed surveys provide preliminary evidence for the proposed measures’ internal consistency, reliability, structural validity, and for its discriminant validity with other constructs. We also provide evidence for the measure’s criterion validity – and for its use with different research approaches.

By developing and validating an augmented measure for early-stage opportunity beliefs, we hope to contribute means to examine the antecedent reasons why some entrepreneurs have higher / lower beliefs – and the consequences this may have for entrepreneurs’ efforts (and success) at developing and exploiting different opportunity ideas. In doing so, we also hope to provide scholars with tools to examine the effects of relevant differences between opportunity ideas in both experimental and field research – including using our measure for assessing the beliefs of other stakeholders than the focal entrepreneurs.

Principal Topics

Despite its relevance, academic understanding of information search behavior and how it contributes to opportunity recognition continues to face important challenges. Among other issues, existing measures suffer from limited abilities to distinguish between different search behaviors. First, some scales only use one item to capture specific search behaviors, even if most methodologists would acknowledge this approach as problematic. Second, most existing scales focus on general individual information search behavior, assuming that it is constant over time and independent of the situation at hand. And third, existing measures likely fail to capture meaningful variations in search behaviors and patterns. To address these issues, we develop and validate a novel scale of entrepreneurial information search behavior. We posit that entrepreneurial information search behaviors can be usefully delineated around three broad categories, namely, passive, active, and systematic search.

Methods

We combined inductive and deductive approaches to generate a pool of 22 candidate items, which we then pre-tested with academic professionals and executives from medical technology companies. We then performed two pilot studies to obtain preliminary evidence of the instrument’s validity and to further refine the pool of items. First, we conducted a survey with 211 entrepreneurship students. Four items showed higher loadings across domains and hence were edited after consultation. Second, we performed a content-analysis survey with 51 business students to establish that the candidate items effectively matched their intended search behaviors. Finally, we assessed the measure’s structural validity through an online survey conducted with 128 executives from medical technology companies, and which served to validate an 11-item instrument.

Results and Implications

The developed instrument constitutes a valuable measurement tool for entrepreneurship scholars’ intent on probing the meaning and impact of information search behaviors in entrepreneurs’ efforts to recognize promising opportunities. The instrument enables researchers to investigate outcomes and antecedents of different search behaviors. Likewise, the instrument allows for studying the extent to which such behaviors can be influenced, learned or improved. As such, we believe the developed instrument offers a valuable building block for future studies of the dynamics underpinning opportunity recognition.

Interview durch René Güntensperger.