Entrepreneurs cannot literally create “something from nothing”. For success, they also need some “raw material” to work with. While everybody agrees that new technologies, regulatory changes, and demographic and socio-cultural shifts provide such “raw material”, we do not yet have a unified understanding of precisely how, why and for whom such environmental changes open up possibilities for profitable new business activities.
In this talk, Professor Per Davidsson presents a new framework that can help entrepreneurs identify the precise business benefits different types of external change can offer:
– What do the scope of the change and the manner in which it happens (e.g., sudden/unpredictable vs. gradual/predictable) tell us about the potential of new businesses based on it, or about what type of actor can most likely realize that potential (e.g., start-ups vs. incumbent firms)?
– What are the specific benefits (e.g., saving costs, saving time, increasing demand) that the change can offer?
– And when in the business creation process do these benefits kick in?
These are the type of questions that the presented framework attempts to guide to fruitful answers.
