Proposing Social Resources as the Fundamental Catalyst Toward Opportunity Creation

Abstract

The growing body of research on the creation view of opportunities suggests that social processes between potential entrepreneurs and interested parties often account for why many technically brilliant business ideas are abandoned sometime between conceptualization and market launch. Surprisingly though, few studies have comprehensively examined the different roles various categories of social resources play at different stages of the opportunity‐creation process. Hence, the present article fills this gap by outlining how the unique resources of social capital and social competence facilitate entrepreneurs' ability to guide imagined ideas through the multistage, path dependent, socially complex opportunity‐creation process. Copyright © 2015 Strategic Management Society.