Early warning: the role of market on entrepreneurial alertness

Abstract

Given the growth and role of entrepreneurship today, it is becoming increasingly
important to understand how new entrepreneurial opportunities get developed. Discussions of the emergence of new entrepreneurial opportunities often include “eureka” moments, but our understanding of how new opportunities get brought forward is limited. We attribute the difference to a loosely defined quality that Kirzner called “entrepreneurial alertness”. Other market actors do not have the responsibility to create innovative market opportunities although they do have an obligation to consider such opportunities once they are available in the marketplace. Consequently, understanding the opportunity identification process
represents one of the core intellectual questions for the domain of entrepreneurship. So the question of this paper is how are market environments represented and interpreted in the mind of the entrepreneur such that opportunity identification occurs? and what factors impress on it? To achieve this goal we distribute questionnaires between 115 M.A. students from Economics and Management college of University of Sistan & Baluchestan for the years
2012 and 2013. Analysis was done by correlation test. Results showed that there is a significant relationship between market disequilibrium, accuracy vs. timeliness, schema complexity, counterfactual thinking, frame-breaking and sensitivity to profit potential and student’s entrepreneurial alertness; but the relationship between ignorance of new resource and excessive optimism or pessimism about resource and student’s entrepreneurial alertness was not significant.