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The purpose of this paper is to bridge the obvious gap presented in research on antecedents of effectuation by building a research model from the perspectives of effectuation and entrepreneurial opportunity.

This paper examines the effects of patterns of opportunity discovery and the innovativeness of entrepreneurial opportunity on the decision-making process of effectuation in new venture creation. Eight hypotheses are put forward and examined by hierarchical multiple logistic regression. The data in this paper are based on the first two rounds of survey data from Chinese Panel Study of Entrepreneurial dynamics.

The empirical results show that patterns of opportunity discovery have significant positive effects (at least partially) on effectuation. Namely, entrepreneurs employing fortuitous discovery tend to use available means and leverage contingency. And with lower innovativeness of opportunity, entrepreneurs are more likely to use affordable loss and leverage contingency.

The study is limited to each dimension of effectuation based on the single-item measure, which cannot completely reflect the effectual construct. More research should to be done to improve measures of effectuation.

The findings are useful for entrepreneurs to make effective decisions whether to choose effectuation in the face of different patterns of opportunity discovery. Besides, it provides the advice on how to cope with the innovativeness of opportunity and seize entrepreneurial opportunities to entrepreneurs.

This paper first systematically studies the effects of entrepreneurial opportunity on effectuation, making up for the obvious gap of research on antecedents of effectuation.

This study aims to investigate the antecedents of the internationalisation strategy i.e., effectuation, causation and bricolage on the international performance of the firm.

In total, the study uses 138 peer-reviewed articles on effectuation, causation, effectual/causal decision-making logics and related issues such as the impact of antecedent factors of international strategy (i.e. effectuation, causation and bricolage) on the international performance of the firm.

Even though the theory of effectuation was formulated in 2001, to a large extent it has still not moved away from the realm of small entrepreneurial firms. The development of effectuation logic has accelerated in recent years, but the bulk of the research still focusses on small entrepreneurial firms rather than on the application of the theory in larger, non-entrepreneurial firms. Furthermore, effectuation theory would benefit from being developed into the realm of psychology and sociology.

This study offers a conceptual model on how effectuation, causation and bricolage influence internationalisation strategy, which, in turn, impacts the international performance of the firm. Furthermore, the study discusses the effectual logic for larger firms. The exponential growth of studies on effectuation during recent years, i.e. 2017 to the first quarter of 2020, shows that researchers have responded to calls by leading authors stating that effectuation theory is a field with great potential for further theoretical developments. This study presents a literature review of the critical issue of the engagement of internationalisation strategies with effectuation, causation, bricolage and the international performance of the firm compared to the earlier literature review for the period 2001–2016 by Matalamäki (2017) and Karami et al. (2019) on effectuation and internationalisation.

This paper aims to investigate the distinctive role of serendipity in opportunity exploration. The study specifically explores how serendipity happens and the pattern of its occurrence. The paper attempts to break new ground in the study of serendipity within the entrepreneurship area. Serendipity is quite established in scientific literature and investigating this concept in the context of entrepreneurship contributes towards the discourse on why some firms are able to discover and realise opportunities that seem to present themselves sometimes out of nowhere.

The study uses multiple case studies, cross-country approaches and the causal mapping method.

The findings suggest that serendipity is likely to take place at the early stages of firm formation. In addition to the three patterns of serendipity that are well-known in accidental scientific discoveries, the authors identify and introduce “entrepreneurial serendipity” as a distinctive pattern in entrepreneurship, whereby entrepreneurs look for any opportunity to start a business and explore an appropriate opportunity that comes along.

This research has several limitations that offer new opportunities for future research. Further research can be undertaken to compare successful fast-growth firms with unsuccessful firms to determine how entrepreneurs were exposed to serendipity and to what extent they were able to exploit and realise opportunities. A comparative study would also enhance the authors’ interpretation of the role of serendipity in these two types of firms and demonstrate the different levels of serendipity they are potentially exposed to. The debate on serendipity could benefit from quantitative research and some tangible measures of serendipity can be developed.

The findings help entrepreneurs understand elements involved in opportunity exploration. The role of serendipity and its sources offer some suggestions on how entrepreneurs can potentially expose themselves to serendipity. The role of networks is crucial to doing business, and entrepreneurs should be aware of expanding their personal and business networks. Being engaged in friendly, professional and academic networks helps in finding new opportunities. Perseverance, being alert to changes in the environment and commitment to clients in terms of high-quality products and services are other elements that may open new windows of opportunity.

This paper provides empirical evidence that serendipity does play an important role in nearly every investigated business, regardless of their size and age. Serendipity potentially leads to new opportunities and entrepreneurs can explore them to achieve growth. By investigating grown firms in New Zealand and Iran, the authors identified a new pattern of serendipity in terms of opportunity discovery. This unique pattern, entrepreneurial serendipity, is characterised by finding an unspecified opportunity through an orderly or haphazard search, which could happen with either high or low levels of knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to review the recent critique of the discovery view of opportunities and by implication the current state of the so‐called creation view of opportunities.

A systematic review of articles published from 2000‐2010 which feature a critique of the discovery view of opportunities. The review uses an open coding approach to identify central themes in the critique. Four central themes are identified, and from within‐theme patterns three distinct groups within the literature are identified.

The four themes suggest that the discovery view is incomplete, that social and relational interactions are more pervading and important than the discovery view suggests, that opportunities are created and that the role of individuality and subjectivity needs to be emphasized more. Three distinct groups within the literature are identified, each presenting different critiques of the discovery view, theoretical foci and implications for method and practice. Furthermore, the discussion suggests that the opportunity concept is a focal point for important debates in the entrepreneurship field, that the creation view is diverse and should not be referred to in the singular and that seeking reconciliation between the discovery and creation views is a problematic strategy. Finally, it is suggested that a continued dialog exploring differences both between the discovery and creation views as well as between the creation views is a fruitful strategy for the development of the field.

The article presents a review of both the critique of the discovery view and the so‐called creation view, thereby supplementing and advancing from existing reviews of the opportunity concept in entrepreneurship. This furthers our understanding of the role of opportunities in entrepreneurial processes.

Discovering opportunities is a key entrepreneurship competence for those who want to start their own business and who choose to enter the workforce. In this study, the authors focus on the antecedents of the ability to discover entrepreneurial opportunities by uncovering how and when students' personal initiative (Frese and Fay, 2001) leads to an increase in this key competency. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of risk-taking and creativity in the interplay between personal initiative and opportunity discovery competencies among university students.

Data were collected with a self-assessment tool in two moments in time, using a sample of 103 university students from Portugal enrolled in an entrepreneurship course. The authors measured personal initiative and entrepreneurial risk-taking at the beginning of the entrepreneurship course (Time 1). Two months later (Time 2), by the end of an entrepreneurship course, the authors measured creativity and opportunity discovery abilities.

The results of this study showed that risk-taking mediates the effect of personal initiative on opportunity discovery and that creativity interacts with risk-taking and opportunity discovery. Specifically, the authors found that the relationship between entrepreneurial risk-taking and opportunity discovery is positive and statistically significant when students display average or above-average creativity. The indirect effect of the personal initiative on opportunity discovery through entrepreneurial risk-taking seems to increase when the student's creativity increases, as the index of moderated mediation is positive.

As with all studies, there are limitations to work of this study. First, data of this study is restricted to a sample of students from Portugal. As such, the authors should be careful about generalizations concerning students from other cultural settings; entrepreneurship competencies can differ across countries. Second, the findings of the present study are based on students’ self-reports regarding their own entrepreneurship competencies.

This work can inspire entrepreneurship educators to look at the entrepreneurship competencies models holistically and inspire future work to explore the relationship patterns between entrepreneurial competencies.

Few researchers and even fewer practitioners would deny that serendipitous events play a central role in the growth process of firms. However, most international marketing models ignore the role of serendipity in the opportunity discovery process. The authors provide a nuanced view on international opportunities by developing the role of serendipitous opportunities in the foreign market entry process. The authors develop a model integrating the notions of serendipity, entrepreneurial logic, experiential knowledge and network knowledge redundancy. From the study’s model, the authors condense three sets of hypotheses on the relationships among experiential knowledge and entry strategy, network knowledge redundancy, entry strategy and serendipity.

The authors confront the study’s hypotheses with data collected on-site at 168 Swedish firms covering 234 opportunities, and to test the hypotheses, the authors ran ordinary least squares (OLS) regression tests in three steps.

The results of the study’s analysis reveal that experiential knowledge and network knowledge redundancy both lead to a logic based on rigid planning and systematic search, which in turn reduces the likelihood that serendipitous opportunities will be realized in the foreign market entry process.

This is the first study that develops a measure of opportunities that are the outcome of serendipitous events. In addition, the authors integrate network and learning theories and internationalization theory by establishing antecedents to, and outcomes of, the entry strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of entrepreneurship that can help researchers, policymakers and practitioners develop entrepreneurial responses to the current economic, environmental and socio-spatial crisis.

The paper adopts a conceptual approach. Hudson’s diagnosis of the current patterns of production is applied to the two dominant streams of theorising on entrepreneurship: the opportunistic discovery view and the resourcefulness view of, for example, effectuation.

The analysis indicates that the opportunistic discovery view and, to some extent, the resourcefulness view are both inadequate as conceptual platforms for entrepreneurial responses to the economic, environmental and socio-spatial crisis. Instead, an alternative perspective on entrepreneurship is developed: Entrepreneurship as re-sourcing. The perspective emphasises the importance of building regional-level resilience through entrepreneurial activity that sources resources from new places and uses these resources to create multiple forms of value.

The paper draws attention to dysfunctions in the current theorising on entrepreneurship in light of the economic, environmental and socio-spatial crisis. Instead, the authors offer an alternative. In doing so, the paper also points to the difficult trade-offs that exist between, for example, long-term resilience and short-term competitiveness and growth on a regional, as well as firm level.

This paper adds to research by offering an alternative view of entrepreneurship grounded – not in economics – but in economic geography, thus highlighting the importance of productions’ grounding in material reality and the importance of addressing non-economic concerns in our way of thinking about entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this research is to reveal how to improve the quality of entrepreneurship by exploring the key factor, opportunity development, impacting the innovation strategy of new ventures. It also introduces political and business ties as moderating variables to reveal the uniqueness of entrepreneurial activities in the Chinese context.

Empirical data from 215 entrepreneurs and top executives in Chinese new ventures were gathered through a survey and the statistical method used is the regression model.

The empirical results indicate that: (1) new ventures' opportunity creation positively impacts innovation strategy, while opportunity discovery has a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) impact on innovation strategy; (2) the relationship between opportunity development and innovation strategy is moderated by political and business ties.

This research analyzes and compares the effect of opportunity discovery and opportunity creation on new ventures' innovation strategy. This research further offers an in-depth understanding of the influence mechanism between opportunity development and innovation strategy among Chinese new ventures. Further, the results provide practical guidance for new ventures to develop innovation strategies and for Chinese governments to make entrepreneurial policies.

The purpose of this study is to change the level of entrepreneurial alertness from individual to group and from the group to the organizational level and apply it to international market entry.

A literature review, meth-synthesis, interview and focal group are used for the final research framework. The way of theorizing for changing levels of entrepreneurial alertness is multi-level method. A framework for international market entry, a process of internationalization and an organizational learning process was used for the final conceptual framework.

A new framework for international entrepreneurial alertness in the opportunity discovery of individual, group and organizational level was developed.

Researchers will be able to use this framework for extending opportunity discovery and entrepreneurial alertness theories at individual, group, organizational and international levels.

Using the final framework, entrepreneurs and organizations will be able to discover new opportunities, and teachers will be able to educate international entrepreneurial alertness and opportunity discovery at individual, group and organizational levels.

The paper begins with an overview of previous researches in this area and then moves on to combine them using meth-synthesis to create a new framework for international entrepreneurial alertness in opportunity discovery. Note that the levels of entrepreneurial alertness from individual to group and from the group to the organizational level have been changed using a multi-level theorizing method.

This paper aims to complement existing theories of internationalization by studying an important aspect which has been neglected in previous studies: the process of international entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. International market entry is conceptualized as an entrepreneurial, innovative act; and opportunity recognition consists of both discovery as well as deliberate and systematic search.

The methodology employed involves eight case studies of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in knowledge‐based industries in Australia. The unit of analysis is the “opportunity‐firm” nexus.

The paper finds that firms with little or no prior international knowledge tend to make use of opportunity discovery rather than deliberate/systematic search. In contrast, firms with extensive prior international experience and knowledge were found to deliberately search and discover their first international opportunity. International opportunity discovery did not occur simply through serendipitous encounters with new information from networks or referrals but involved interpreting possible matches between pre‐existing means (resources, skills, new technologies) and new ends (international markets) in a problem solving process. It favours those with the requisite prior knowledge and entrepreneurial orientation.

The paper offers guidelines on what business practitioners and export promotion agencies can and cannot do to influence opportunity recognition process. Particular attention was paid to strategies to avoid costly deliberate search among resource‐stricken SMEs.

This study introduces Knightian uncertainty and Kirznerian discovery as the conceptual cornerstones of internationalization that can help account for the lack of incrementalism and optimizing logic in internationalization among smaller firms.