Entrepreneurial Action: The Creation of New Social Institutions

Abstract

Despite calls to integrate opportunity formation into our understanding of entrepreneurial action, the opportunity discovery model continues to dominate scholarship and practice. Current research on entrepreneurial action assumes that the core challenge for entrepreneurs is the problem of running search calculations to discover an opportunity. This paper offers an alternative account of entrepreneurial action, suggesting that the core challenge lies, instead, in the creation and integration of the agent’s venture into the fabric of social reality. We describe a framework for understanding how this is done, and discuss its implications for theory development, practice, and pedagogy.