Differences in students’ understanding of opportunity process matters for their learning!

Abstract

Despite different views on opportunities and opportunities identification, there seems to be consensus about the significant role of opportunities in the entrepreneurship process and for the success of the entrepreneur (Shane & Venkataraman 2000, Eckhardt & Shane 2003, Gaglio & Katz 2001). However, even though opportunities, depending on the purpose and contributor, are regarded as a core element, process or competence in entrepreneurship, it is only recently that the question of how to teach or learn these opportunity-related competences has started to attract scholars (Saks & Gaglio 2002, Corbett 2005, Lumpkin & Lichtenstein 2005). The problem is that how the nature and process of opportunities are understood has an effect on learning and teaching practices. We argue that the differences in understanding what opportunities are have effect on how to learn and teach opportunity competences. The starting point though should be the knowledge about how students understand what opportunities are and how they want to enhance their competences related to the opportunity process. Consequently, the aim of our research is to understand how students understand opportunity process. First, we identify different theoretical approaches to the opportunity process from the learning perspective. Then, we investigate (basing on 16 writings), how students understand what opportunities are in the venture creation process with respect to these different approaches and, finally, we elaborate what this means for learning and teaching practices. On the basis of the theories of Cantillon (1931), Mises (1949) and Kirzner (1963) regarding human beings as central to entrepreneurship, our study identifies three approaches through which the opportunity process could take place: search, discovery, action. Empirical analysis validates proposed division. We conclude that courses aimed at opportunity enhancement should be designed in a way that students increase their awareness of the different nature of an opportunity and its process, as well as the varying nature of human involvement in opportunity processes. Entrepreneurship education should not be to look for uniform methods and teaching tools, but to try to combine them in order to enable all students to learn and increase their competences