Social networking and gender effects in opportunity identification

Opportunity identification is a key focal point of research in entrepreneurship (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000; Zahra and Wright, 2011) and gender variations in entrepreneurship still present an insufficiently tackled research area (DeTienne and Chandler, 2007; Gupta and Turban, 2012). This article sets the focus on the social networking approach to opportunity identification for entrepreneurship and examines variations across gender. A qualitative comparative study is adopted based on the in-depth interviewing of 30 Lebanese entrepreneurs operating in the services industry hence riding the wave of the call for more qualitative studies in entrepreneurship research (Dimov, 2011; Sarasvathy and Venkataraman, 2011; Smith et al., 2013). This study contributes to entrepreneurship and gender literature through revealing opportunity identification as a social gendered process that is strongly linked to the community the entrepreneur belongs to. Consequently it suggests that male and female individuals adopt different socialisation experiences and differently use their social networks for the development and validation of their business opportunities.