Opportunity identification competence : explaining individual and exploring team opportunity identification by employees

Opportunities and their identification are of significant importance for competitiveness in today’s complex and turbulent business environment because they serve as a key influencing factor for new value-creation. Opportunity identification (OI) is interesting not only from the perspective of new business start-ups, but also from the perspective of employees in existing organisations. Each entrepreneurial process starts with an imagined, rudimentary idea in the mind of an individual. The further exploration and development of such opportunities by employees can lead to the realisation of all kinds of corporate entrepreneurship outcomes, such as innovation, strategic renewal, and internal or external venturing. This dissertation reports on the capability of employees to identify opportunities, referred to as opportunity identification competence (OIC). The importance of OI by employees is widely recognised in practice, and scholars have contributed significantly to understanding what opportunities are, how opportunities come into being, and how OIC can be measured. Nevertheless, substantial research challenges still need to be addressed. More specifically, based on both entrepreneurship literature and literature on organisational learning and entrepreneurship education, three overarching research issues have been identified: The OI process has not been fully mapped out, including the role of individuals and teams. Defining and explaining OIC is problematic because scholars tend not to agree whether opportunities are discovered in the economic environment or created by individuals. Existing measurements of OIC have been criticised, because most of them include self-perceptions or the recall of earlier identified opportunities. The main goal of this thesis was to contribute to the literature by addressing these three overarching research issues. Accordingly, the central research question was: What characterises opportunity identification by employees on the individual