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Over the last ten years, researchers have increasingly focused on the pursuit of opportunity as one of the central acts of entrepreneurship. This chapter proposes a model of opportunity recognition which emphasizes the process through which entrepreneurs interact with their social contexts to develop opportunities, that is, to develop and shape ideas into attractive opportunities. The central research question is “how does an individual use his or her social context to recognize opportunity?” The question can be re-phrased in two parts, highlighting the two sides of the influence process. First, how do the people around the individual affect both the entrepreneurial thinking process and the opportunity ideas? And second, how does the individual structure his or her social context and use the people surrounding him or her for recognizing and pursuing opportunities?

Accelerated internationalization occurs when a firm engages in international business early in its life cycle or when it builds international business experience with great speed, perhaps incorporating international activities in more parts of the firm's value chain than has occurred historically. Such acceleration seems to have been occurring since the late 1980s, and evidence indicates that it is not a temporary or abnormal phenomenon (Organisation for Economic co-operation and development (OECD), 1997). Many firms around the world experienced an era of accelerated internationalization in the 1990s (OECD, 1997) and many are continuing to do so.

Cognition has always been central to the popular way of thinking about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs imagine a different future. They envision or discover new products or services. They perceive or recognize opportunities. They assess risk, and figure out how to profit from it. They identify possible new combinations of resources. Common to all of these is the individual’s use of their perceptual and reasoning skills, what we call cognition, a term borrowed from the psychologists’ lexicon.

This eighth volume in the series Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth focuses on international entrepreneurship. We are fortunate to draw on scholars both new to the field as well as some of those who founded this unique specialty. International entrepreneurship, perhaps more than any subfield of entrepreneurship, is a product of our particular zeitgeist. The last quarter of the 20th Century brought about one of the periods of the greatest internationalization in all phases of business.

In this chapter, we discuss the merits and challenges of organic communication within an inclusive, iterative research design through our research project ‘Improving the quality of life of families with parents with intellectual disabilities (IDs) and their children (<12 years) by means of assistive robotics’. We will discuss the research process, its key steps and preliminary findings, as well as how inclusivity of participants was taken along throughout this process. The links between research design, designers and project participants are explored and reflected on. Our positions as researchers within the research process are also reflected upon. We will additionally address the implications of our research for the broader field of inclusive design for assistive robotics and the creative methodologies employed and tailored to the needs of families headed by parents with an ID and their children. In this, we keep a close eye on the difficulties such families face within the context of our research project. Lastly, we reflect on several key markers of collaboration within marginalised communities we encountered in our research.