Entrepreneurship education as a factor of entrepreneurial opportunity recognition for starting a new business

1.INTRODUCTIONEntrepreneurial process begins with someone's decision to become entrepreneur (Barringer and Ireland, 2009), followed by entrepreneurial opportunity recognition (Hatten, 2006; Kaplan, 2003; Timmons and Spinelli, 2007), which leads to starting a business (Bygrave, 1989). Timmons and Spinelli (2007) observe entrepreneurial process through three driving forces of successful launching entrepreneurial venture, whereby opportunity takes the first place, followed by entrepreneurial team and resources.Researchers and theoreticians, authors of many papers, who address the issue of entrepreneurial opportunity, have different definitions of this term. Opportunity is seen as an idea (Davidsson et al., 2004), business form or potential company (DeTienne and Chandler, 2007; Singh 1998), objective phenomenon separable from entrepreneur (Shane 2000) or subjective phenomenon resulting from entrepreneur's cognitive capacities (Sarason et al., 2006). Barringer and Ireland (2009, p. 220) define opportunity as "a favorable set of circumstances that creates a need for a new product, service or business." A very similar interpretation is the one offered by Casson (1982, in Shane and Venkataraman, 2000, p. 220), who defines entrepreneurial opportunities as "those situations in which new goods, services, raw materials, and organizing methods can be introduced and sold at greater than their cost of production. " Entrepreneurial opportunity recognition can be seen as "either perceiving a possibility to create new businesses, or significantly improving the position of an existing business, in both cases resulting in new profit potential" (Christensen et al., 1989, p. 3).Therefore, an entrepreneur primarily creates an idea of a new product, process or service, but not all ideas are opportunities as well (Dobre, 2006; Hatten, 2006; Timmons and Spinelli, 2007), and thus will not develop into businesses. Entrepreneur's role is to recognize the idea as a potential opportunity for starting a business (Ardichvili et al., 2003), but also to be actively involved in shaping the idea so that it may become an opportunity, by overcoming the environment uncertainty (Dimov, 2007). For an idea to be an opportunity, it needs to satisfy criteria of attractiveness, sustainability, timeliness and to be anchored in a product or service which adds value for its buyer or end-user (Barringer and Ireland, 2009; Hatten, 2006; Timmons and Spinelli, 2007).One of the central issues for entrepreneurship researchers is how and why some people are able to identify and use entrepreneurial opportunity and start a business, while others are not. What are the factors conditioning entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and exploitation in order to start an entrepreneurial venture? Research has shown that among other, these factors may include: creativity (Hills et al., 1997), work experience (Timmons and Spinelli, 2007), social networking of entrepreneurs (Ozgen and Baron, 2007; Singh et al., 1999), prior knowledge on the market, customers' needs and the ways to satisfy them (Shane 2000), intuition and ability to foresee (Zahra, 2002) or cognitive factors (Krueger, 2003). As key factors influencing the processes of recognizing and developing the opportunity, which lead to starting a business, Ardichivili et al. (2003) mention information asymmetry and prior knowledge, social networking and personality traits that include creativity, optimism and efficiency. These factors lead to entrepreneurial alertness, which further leads to entrepreneurial opportunity recognition.Literature review has identified almost a complete lack of theoretical discussion and research into the relation between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. More commonly, the attention is directed to the relationship between entrepreneurship education and the decision to become entrepreneur, successful launching a business, which is a wider term than entrepreneurial opportunity recognition, or successful running of the founded company. …