PAPER: BEING ALERT TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES: IT IS A MATTER OF TIME.

PAPER: BEING ALERT TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES: IT IS A MATTER OF TIME.

Ludvig Levasseur, Jintong Tang, Masoud Karami and Lowell Busenitz

Journal: Journal of Business Venturing Insights

Entrepreneurship researchers have already emphasized the importance of discovering viable business opportunities, with entrepreneurial alertness to these opportunities playing a central role in that research domain. This research interest has been exemplified by an increasing number of works on alertness, seen as a concept related to individual thoughts and thinking processes. In particular, Tang, Kacmar, and Busenitz have highlighted that entrepreneurial alertness consists of the following steps: Information scanning and search (i.e., pursuing information that sheds light on potential business-related changes), information association and connection (i.e., associating diverse and previously unrelated pieces of information), and opportunity evaluation and judgment (i.e., making follow-up judgments on the potential implications of the opportunity for businesses). Moreover, time is another concept that plays an important role in the identification and development of profitable business opportunities. Specifically, how individuals (in the paper, entrepreneurs) experience and perceive their past, present, and future (i.e., their time perspective) also plays an important role in their alertness to profitable business opportunities.

The authors notably found that their future time perspective (i.e., an individual is said to have a future time perspective when he is trying to achieve future goals and get future rewards) had an important and positive impact on their ability to scan and search for information, to associate and connect diverse and previously unrelated pieces of information, and their ability to evaluate and judge the potential business opportunity they had at hand. Shedding more light on how the experiences and perceptions entrepreneurs have of their past, present, and future influenced their alertness to profitable business opportunities, the paper has some potentially important implications including one on the driving role of the positive and negative thoughts entrepreneurs have about the past, present, and future in enhancing (for positive thoughts) or impeding (for negative thoughts) their ability to identify profitable business opportunities.

EASYSENDY.com