A General Theory of Entrepreneurship: The Individual-opportunity Nexus

Reseña:
In this volume, Scott Shane extends the analysis of entrepreneurship by offering an overarching conceptual framework that explains the different parts of the entrepreneurial process - the opportunities, the people who pursue them, the skills and strategies used to organize and exploit opportunities, and the environmental conditions favourable to them - in a coherent way. Given the level of interest devoted to entrepreneurship in the economy and among academics at business schools, one would think that researchers would have deep insights into this phenomenon. However, those who look closely at academic investigations of entrepreneurship realize that scholarly understanding of this field is quite limited. Unlike its sister fields of accounting, marketing, finance, organizational behaviour and strategic management, entrepreneurship is rather poorly explained by academics. Shane resolves this by considering the nexus of enterprising individuals and valuable opportunities and by using that nexus to understand the processes of discovery and exploitation of opportunities, the acquisition of resources, entrepreneurial strategy and the organizing process.

Índice:
1. Introduction 2. The Role of Opportunities 3. Discovery of Entrepreneurial Opportunities 4. Individual Differences and the Decision to Exploit 5. Psychological Factors and the Decision to Exploit 6. Industry Differences in Entrepreneurial Activity 7. The Environmental Context of Entrepreneurship 8. Resource Acquisition 9. Entrepreneurial Strategy 10. The Organizing Process 11. Conclusions