“I never needed eyes to see”: Leveraging extreme challenges for successful venture creation

Abstract

Challenge-based entrepreneurship is a nascent research area that has sought to tackle a longstanding issue of how entrepreneurs may overcome extreme challenges. We seek fresh insights into this issue by researching entrepreneurs who face one of the most extreme physical challenges, namely of acute sight loss (“blindness”). While this condition carries social perceptions of extreme physical incapacity and performance limitations, there continue to be notable examples of entrepreneurs with permanent blindness. How do blind entrepreneurs overcome barriers resulting from their impairment? By observing and conversing with two blind serial entrepreneurs, we offer preliminary answers to this question by generating insights into processes of opportunity formation in which ideas are conceived and developed out of the entrepreneurs' challenges. Our chief finding is that our blind entrepreneurs instrumentalized their impairments for commercial or social purposes by creating ventures that leveraged public perceptions of blindness and disability. Accordingly, in their ventures, our entrepreneurs drew on distinctive attributes of their physical and social challenges as a means of exploiting narrow conceptions of disabled people's capabilities. These entrepreneurs therefore overcame their challenges by capitalizing on public conceptions of their limited capabilities. The subsequent Discussion offers research opportunities in and beyond challenge-based entrepreneurship by considering a number of theoretical and practical implications of the adaptive skills and attributes of our entrepreneurs that have enabled them to engage with popular “ableist” and medical, or “tragic”, perceptions of disability in original and positive ways.