Opportunities, Relational Embeddedness and Network Structure

The thesis of this chapter is that the characteristics of the business network surrounding the firm have a profound impact on how the firm finds and exploits opportunities. Characteristics of networks and relations between network actors have been increasingly researched during recent decades (see e.g. Dyer and Chu, 2000; Grabher, 1993; Granovetter, 1985, 1992; Gulati, 1998, 1999; Gulati et al., 2000; Håkansson and Snehota, 1995; Halinen and Törnroos, 1998; Kogut, 2000; McEvily and Zaheer, 1999; Rowley et al., 2000; Uzzi, 1996, 1997; Zukin and Di Maggio, 1990). In parallel, a wide and strong tradition of research has emerged on the nature of opportunity, especially among entrepreneurship researchers (see e.g. Ardichvili et al., 2003; Eckhardt and Shane, 2003; Shane, 2000). We aim to combine these two traditions and seek to develop a model for analyzing the relation between different types of opportunities and different types of relationships and networks. Entrepreneurial behavior and social networks have previously been explored (Ardichvili et al., 2003; Ellis, 2000; Jack and Anderson, 2002; Kenney and Goe, 2004; Simsek et al., 2003). These studies have observed that there seems to be a relation between finding an opportunity and the characteristics of the social network, but to our knowledge there are no studies investigating the character of relationships and network configurations and how it influences the firm’s way of finding and exploiting opportunities.