Discovery and Exploitation

Entrepreneurship is concerned with the discovery and exploitation of opportunities for economic value creation. The opportunity can be in the form of new goods, services, raw materials, business models, or different organizing methods that can be exploited for profit. The term discovery implies the awareness or realization of potential opportunities and is based on two primary modes: search and recognition. Exploitation implies that the entrepreneur realizes a means-end relationship to utilize the discovered opportunity for profit. An embedded causal relationship exists between discovery and exploitation.

Entrepreneurial opportunities and their discovery are often distinguished from opportunities in general, since entrepreneurial opportunities are typically restricted to novel and/or new approaches to relationships and business models. Hence the refinement of existing models, improvements in processes to increase efficiency, and ...