The Opportunity-Based Approach to Entrepreneurial Discovery Research
Patrick J. Murphy, Matthew R. Marvel · 2018
Entrepreneurship research addresses the discovery, evaluation, and utilization of future goods and services. Research emphasizing opportunities assumes that the set of empirical factors in entrepreneurial discovery events rotates more evenly around opportunities than around people or firms. Episodic knowledge is a core element of the opportunity-based approach (OBA). Entrepreneurship theory must take steps to conceptualize how knowledge outside the purview of an entrepreneur can contribute meaningfully to opportunities. The spatial and temporal convergences of factors that make up an opportunity are indicated empirically by espoused episodic knowledge of them. Nonparametric statistics are amenable to the kind of frequency data examined in OBA research. OBA empirical research using these methods can generate findings indicating the statistical likelihood that an entrepreneurial discovery event will occur given a particular constellation of episodic knowledge indicators. The OBA has implications pertaining to variable operationalization, analysis level, and statistical methodology.