Entrepreneurship, Opportunities and Entrepreneurial Learning

The review of literature covering business incubation, with a focus on university-based incubators (UBI) presented in Chap. 2 points to an important knowledge gap; namely, how the incubation process works in practice from the perspective of incubatees. Improving understanding of the entrepreneurial process within BIs is fundamental to advancing theoretical and practical knowledge. Therefore, as a first step in exploring the interaction between the incubation process and entrepreneurs, this chapter presents an overview of the literature in the field of entrepreneurship and opportunity identification. We pay particular attention to the important issue of how an individual’s prior knowledge shapes their approach to new opportunities, whether discovered or created. Renewed interest in the interaction of entrepreneur and opportunity identification was stimulated by a number of key publications early in the twenty-first century (Shane 2000; Shane and Venkataraman 2000). Others suggest that rather than ‘identifying’ new opportunities, entrepreneurs create opportunities based on their existing knowledge and experience (Gartner et al. 1992; Sanz-Velasco 2006; Sarasvathy 2001).