Learning and entrepreneurial opportunity development within a Finnish telecommunication International New Venture

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the development of entrepreneurial opportunity in a Finnish International New Venture (INV) operating in the telecommunication sector by applying a learning-based approach. Despite decades of research, our knowledge about opportunities is still limited. Prior research has not investigated opportunity in depth but has rather focused more on the ontological debate about its nature or investigating its implications for organizational development and internationalization. Thus, it has been proposed that we go deeper into the phenomenon by focusing on individuals’ perceptions of opportunity and the daily activities related to those. Here, it has been suggested that we should investigate the longitudinal development of opportunity and consider contextual features that influence this, in to advance our understanding of the phenomenon.

A learning-based perspective seems to be a suitable approach because opportunity development seems to primarily be an information-seeking behavior. It has been also suggested that a cognition-based perspective would enable us to observe how individuals interpret market gaps on which entrepreneurial opportunities are largely based. This study focuses on an INV whose key function and strength is learning.

This qualitative study conducted an in-depth and longitudinal investigation of entrepreneurial opportunity development by applying a social learning theory. Consequently, special attention was paid to observing the individual and collective levels of learning and how this learning process contributes to the development of entrepreneurial opportunity. The data analysis followed processual and narrative strategies, which revealed the dynamics and complexity of entrepreneurial opportunity phenomenon and the resulting inductive findings that support the scientific contribution of this dissertation.

This study delved deep into the learning process of individuals and found that this had a significant impact on the development of entrepreneurial opportunity throughout the observation period. In this study, it was found that the initial opportunity discovery and the first steps of its development dated back to the pre-launch period. The discovery and development during this phase were driven by individual characteristics and individuals’ understanding of the customer demand. Moreover, this was driven by contextual features. Similar development continued after the spin-off. Here, the central feature that individuals increasingly realized was the technological use and the commercial benefit of the opportunity to customers. This learning process influenced opportunity in such way that individuals began to realize precise uses for opportunity that matched the real-life demand.

This study contributes to the fields of entrepreneurship and international entrepreneurship by providing a longitudinal and in-depth description of entrepreneurial opportunity discovery and development. Specifically, the individual perspective that contributes to our understanding of entrepreneurial opportunity was emphasized in this dissertation. Moreover, the use of a social learning-based approach provides accurate insights into what and how individuals learn. In doing so, this dissertation provides a comprehensive description of how the learning process contributed to the development of entrepreneurial opportunity. Additionally, this study also provides conclusions that can be applied to the Social Learning Theory.