New Technologies, Vegans, Disasters, and All That Stuff: How to Make Use of External Enablers to Create New Business

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.