A Literature Review of Co-creation of Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Abstract

No opportunity, no entrepreneurship. Ironically, although there is a remarkable consensus on the definition of entrepreneurial opportunity, controversies on its origin and formation process still exist. What’s more, these existing studies, mainly based on either opportunity discovery theory or opportunity creation theory, always separately explore these participation elements of entrepreneurial opportunity without an integrate and dynamic entrepreneurship context, which limits further development of entrepreneurial opportunity. To systemically address these above research disputes and gaps, this paper firstly reviews relevant literature and finds out a new research trend, namely opportunity co-creation, which integrates an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective. However, entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation research is still in its infancy and is fragmented in various topics. Thus, this paper conducts a systematic literature review of entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation, explores and summarizes the definition of entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation, participation elements and realization paths for entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation. It firstly defines entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation as a dynamic evolution process of repeated interaction on co-creating entrepreneurial opportunities jointly among entrepreneurs, their stakeholders and entrepreneurial environment, and then affecting imperfectly competitive elements or products markets. Then, it suggests that entrepreneurial opportunity itself, entrepreneurial subjects and entrepreneurial environment act as participation elements during the co-creation process of entrepreneurial opportunity. Besides, these participation elements provide four basic interactive paths for achieving entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation, which are interaction relationships among entrepreneurial opportunities, among entrepreneurial subjects, between entrepreneurial subject and opportunity, and between entrepreneurial subject and entrepreneurial environment. It has two potential theoretical contributions. On the one hand, it contributes to entrepreneurial opportunity literature by introducing a conception of entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation, which provides a novel and practical theoretical perspective for dealing with the long-running scientific debate focusing around the question of whether opportunities are created” or discovered”. Although there are many interesting research topics focusing on understanding more concrete and context-specific cases of the formation of opportunities, to our best knowledge, this paper firstly puts forward the definition of entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation and suggests an evolutionary conceptual framework for further exploration. On the other hand, this paper helps to broaden research scope of entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective within entrepreneurial opportunity research, which systemically answers these following important questions: what is the definition of entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation? what are the participation elements of entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation? how to realize entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation? Definitely, this paper also has three limitations that should be noted for future research. Firstly, it just puts forward the definition, participation elements and realization paths for entrepreneurial opportunity co-creation, however, its formation condition, and underlying evolutionary mechanism are still in a black box which calls for systematic research in the future. Secondly, the future research can deeply explore the interplay mechanism, influencing mechanism and applicable conditions among these three participation elements. Last but not least, future research should pay more attention to conducting more empirical studies with construction, measurement and scale development as well as hypothesis testing.