The Entrepreneurial Journey: From Entrepreneurial Intent to Opportunity Realization

Abstract

The entrepreneurial process of new business creation starts when a business opportunity is discovered or created by nascent entrepreneurs. This process involves a journey of improvising and coping with uncertainty. There are many obstacles as well as pulling, pushing, and driving forces that the entrepreneur may encounter along the way. In this paper, There need the internal driving forces that solves these problems by taking entrepreneurial actions to actualize new business potential against all odds. The series of entrepreneurs autonomous, innovative, and improvised actions throughout the entrepreneurial process will consist the entrepreneurial journey. This journey will be viewed as a combination of volitional and emergent process of transforming potentiality into actuality, that is, opportunity realization. This paper attempts to explain the internal driving forces that direct, drive, and sustain entrepreneurial processes with and against internal and external conditions and changes. An entrepreneurial process is composed of driving forces of activity and a number of activities related with resource and opportunity. In this paper, we conceptualize the obsessive motivation and internal driving forces that catalyzes the entrepreneurial journey as entrepreneurial intent: entrepreneurial mindset that can be defined as an aroused state of entrepreneurial motivation to initiate, drive and sustain the entrepreneurial journey til the opportunity is completely transformed to real business. A case study method that implements a modified version of the grounded theory method is applied to identify the multidimensional and emergent processes of this entrepreneurial journey. This study examines a sample of high-tech venture firms in Korea. The results show that entrepreneurial intent toward a new opportunity emerges as collective actions for combining new resources to create new value. In the journey, entrepreneurial intent can be considered as internal driving force because it is at the center of underlying layers of the emergent process of opportunity realization. In successful journeys, entrepreneurial intent seems to be an extreme level of entrepreneurial motivation because it is characterized by more energetic functions of motivation: arousal, direction, and duration of entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, these three functions will be referred to as the 3C Effects: the channeling (arousal), the concentrating (direction), and the continuing (duration) of entrepreneurial action. This mechanism converts the actions of the entrepreneur and his/her firm into entrepreneurial ones that aim to seize every chance to make the opportunity into reality. The entrepreneurial actions, increase the chances of serendipity in the external process of creating, attracting, and combining resources to meet the value criteria of market opportunity. Cases of entrepreneurial journey are analyzed in layered and diamond type frameworks. In summary, the volitional and emergent journey can be illuminated by frameworks consisting of multiple phases, dimensions and layers of entrepreneurial process that interact with various kinds of external conditions including business opportunities. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.