Three Views of Entrepreneurial Opportunity

For almost fifty years now, following the trail of issues raised by economists such as Hayek, Schumpeter, Kirzner and Arrow, researchers have studied the economics of technological change and the problem of allocation of resources for invention (invention being the production of information). The bulk of this literature simply assumes that new technical information will either be traded as a commodity or become embodied in products and services (hereafter called ‘economic goods'), without addressing any specific mechanisms or processes for the transformation of new information into new economic goods or new economic entities (such as new firms and new markets). It is inside this gap that we begin our quest for the concept of an “entrepreneurial opportunity.”