Abstract

The purpose of this research was to gain a more profound understanding of the emergence of the business opportunities, and to enhance the development of entrepreneurship theory in relation to this context. This research is to understand two issues: How does a business opportunity emerge? What makes it possible?

This dissertation builds a conceptual framework of the process of creating the Business Opportunity and concentrates on three interrelated sub-processes emerging in it: Business Ideation Process, Business Modeling Process and Business Planning Process. The Business Ideation is defined as creating an idea of the business opportunity with a clear focus on the customer, consideration, connection, and/or commitment. The Business Modeling Process is the conceptual model of the future business opportunity consisting elements such as: value creation; firm’s internal source of advantage; position in the marketplace; profit making; and entrepreneur’s perspective. Finally, the Business Planning Process is the implementation plan of the conceptual business opportunity.

The scientific choices are based on the critical realism that highlights reality simultaneously as existing independently of its observers and acknowledges the role of an actor (the entrepreneur) as being constrained by it as well as being able to change it. Furthermore, this dissertation treats the process of creating the business opportunities as creative process based on the idea of a personal (or everyday) creativity and the method of creative problem solving.

The results indicate that the nature of the process of creating the Business Opportunities, the BOC process, allows all people to be treated as entrepreneurs if they play the role of the entrepreneur by interacting (more or less creatively) with business ideating, business modeling and business planning processes. Hence, the creative problem solving method utilized in every sub-process will free the entrepreneur from the restraint of the dominant insight of the opportunity that sees it as a true vision of the future business venture. Here, the business opportunities are created during the process. Furthermore, the results show a keen interplay between the process of creating business opportunities and their exploitation. Hence, the BOC process appears to be an essential part of the overall entrepreneurial process.