The Nexus of Individual and Opportunity: Opportunity Recognition as a Learning Process

Abstract

This paper focuses on the link between individuals and opportunities. Using experiential learning theory, it views the idiosyncratic nature of individual experience as reflected in a distinct configuration of an individual’s learning structure. It also characterizes opportunities in terms of their epistemological context, i.e. the knowledge gap that needs to be filled for them to be perceived as such. Using an experimental repeated measures design, the paper shows that individual opportunity recognition varies across contexts, and that opportunity recognition in a particular context is related to how one learns from experience.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship

JEL Classification: M13