Playing Chess or Painting Pictures? Unpacking Entrepreneurial Intuition

Abstract

We present a longitudinal, empirical study of the entrepreneurial opportunity development process, focused specifically on intuition in multiple forms. By following the opportunity development process for several participants over a two-year period, we were able to extract empirical instances of various types of intuition applied to the development of entrepreneurial opportunities. We found that the entrepreneurs in the study used at least four distinct types of intuition: problem-solving, creative, social, and temporal. Of these, we propose temporal intuition as a type not yet discussed in extant literature, while the others have not previously been studied in the entrepreneurial context. There are strong connections between these various aspects of intuition, and we discuss how the four types interact in a dynamic, unfolding process we tentatively define as opportunity intuition.