Abstract
Entrepreneurial opportunity stimulates action. Does it only stimulate
entrepreneurs to action? Or to non-entrepreneurs as well? What it is,
and what it is not? Who is an entrepreneur? The concept of opportunity
has been a bedrock in entrepreneurship research since Shane and
Venkataraman’s seminal work in 2000. Researchers have explored the
emergence, the role and the purpose of opportunity since then. Despite
more than two decades of scholarship on the construct that has moved us
well beyond what Shane and Venkataraman originally defined and with
seminal papers that have moved us toward a better and more sophisticated
understanding of the opportunity, we are still asking who an
entrepreneur is? Ramoglou, Gartner and Tsang argue that this is the
wrong question. The definitional varieties and fragments move Davidsson
to suggest dismantling the construct and re-contextualising it with a
more suitable and coherent framework. Foss and Klein suggest doing away
with the opportunity concept altogether. This paper articulates that
opportunity still provides a fundamental scaffold to organise
entrepreneurial research. We propose that opportunity exists as an
artificial imaginative construct in the minds of entrepreneurs. We argue
that the concept of an imagined opportunity can overcome the fragmented
definitions with an elasticity that can clarify and sharpen its
utilitarian value. This paper aims to shift the dialogue on how
opportunity emerges, exists and changes according to the information
presented and subjectively interpreted through mental
visualisation/imagination.