Entrepreneurial Opportunities: Models and Approaches, Assumptions and Viewpoints

The concept of opportunity can be considered as one of the most central and sometimes even the most central issues of entrepreneurship. At the same time, opportunity is one of the most controversial concepts in the entrepreneurship literature, as the assumptions underlying the function of identifying entrepreneurial opportunities and also the nature and characteristics of this phenomenon confront with different approaches and sometimes even paradoxical approaches. In this situation, different approaches and methods for exploiting them in entrepreneurial tasks are also desirable. While referring to the definitions and the central role of the concept of opportunity in the scientific literature of the Entrepreneurship, the present article has attempted to study the viewpoints of prominent researchers of economics and entrepreneurship fields. In the economic supply and demand approach, based on philosophical assumptions and the Means-Ends framework, models of allocation, discovery and creation are the three main patterns in the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities task. Furthermore, Schumpeterian and Kirznerian Opportunities are the two main and distinct perspectives on entrepreneurial opportunities that have developed two main streams of entrepreneurial opportunity studies and research. These two perspectives, in contrast to each other, can be examined from different dimensions of models, approaches, nature and requirements of the phases of entrepreneurial opportunities exploitation and value creation.