Co-constructing an Opportunity with a Community of Inquiry

Dean A Shepherd,Holger Patzelt

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-78935-0_2

Abstract

AbstractEntrepreneurs can learn about potential opportunitiesthrough social interactions with communities of inquiry. However, how do entrepreneurs build such communities, and how do they engage community members over time to develop their potential opportunities? Building on a recent study of eight new ventures and their communities of inquiry over nine months (Shepherd et al. inJournal of Business Venturing, 106033), this chapter presents a social model of opportunity development. The chapter explains how entrepreneurial teams that progress well toward market launch consist of varied specialists who openly engage their communities of inquiry. This open engagement leads such teams to gather diverse information, generate multiple alternatives (technology and market), and test conjectures about their potential opportunities through disconfirmation. In contrast, unsuccessful entrepreneurial teams rely on focused engagement with their communities of inquiry. This focused engagement leads these teams to gather specific information, generate a few related alternatives, and seek to confirm their opportunity conjectures. This chapter highlights new insights into entrepreneurial teams’ engagement with communities of inquiry to explain opportunity development and, ultimately, new venture progress.

Highlights

Entrepreneurs can learn about potential opportunities through social interactions with communities of inquiry
As we described in this chapter, the social model of opportunity development provides new theoretical insights into the role of a community of inquiry and the different mechanisms for engaging community members
This chapter explained a social model of opportunity development (Shepherd et al, 2020)

Summary

Introduction

Entrepreneurs can learn about potential opportunities through social interactions with communities of inquiry. Focused community engagement refers to when entrepreneurial teams interact with their communities of inquiry to explore specific aspects of their potential opportunity they know they want to address and not to generate information entirely new to them. From early in the opportunity-development process, these successful entrepreneurial teams used rudimentary prototypes to generate more information from their interactions with their communities of inquiry.

Results

Conclusion