Opportunity Characteristics Enabling Commercialization in High Tech Environment : A Study on Indian Telecom Start-Ups

Opportunity recognition forms the core of entrepreneurship research. Existing entrepreneurship research has viewed opportunity recognition from varied theoretical lenses with cognition and learning forming the core of most scholarly work. However, prior work has either focused on end result (success or failure) only or more recent work has focused on opportunity recognition process only. But both the aspects need to be analyzed and assessed simultaneously. Moreover, high tech sector is different due to a high component of knowledge intensiveness inherent in it and has been surprisingly ignored in most work. So, we explore a specific high tech sector (telecom sector) in the present paper within an Indian context with the understanding that insights could be utilized by other sectors as well. We employ a detailed case study based approach to identify four characteristics of opportunities that shape the evolution of the opportunity recognition process on its path to commercialization. We also bring out the linkages between characteristics identified by us and existing paradigms in strategic management literature. We further propose that mental heuristics of entrepreneurs is guided by the characteristics identified by us. Our work thus contributes to both theory and practice of entrepreneurship research