Complexity Science and Entrepreneurial opportunities

The use of rigorous philosophical logic to define the nature of opportunities is a powerful way for entrepreneurial researchers to build a framework for theory development and empirical testing. The fields of entrepreneurship and complexity science are linked in a number of important ways. In particular, studies of entrepreneurship and complexity science are both focused on innovation, novelty and emergence: entrepreneurship scholars study the emergence of new organizations; while complexity science scholars study the dynamics of emergence. Linking entrepreneurship to complexity science may provide an elegant structure on which to build and empirically test comprehensive theories of entrepreneurial opportunities. Complexity science is an amalgam of theories, methods, and approaches for studying the process of order creation; the way that global- level structures and properties come- into-being solely due to the interactions between the system’s heterogeneous agents. In entrepreneurship field, Complexity scientists have been developing methods and theories that can explain how and why opportunities emergence in dynamic systems of interactive agents. The present paper aims to take a step toward the goal of providing a philosophical definition of opportunities, and identifying useful methods from complexity science for studying opportunities and emergence events in entrepreneurship. Research on opportunity recognition has emphasized its cognitive basis. Hill, Lumpkin and Shrader (in press) for example, show that the heart of opportunity recognition is a creative insight that reframes a problem or cognitive puzzle in a new way.

کلیدواژه ها:

opportunity discovery ، opportunity creation ، effectuation ، emergence ، complexity science ، technological innovation