OPPORTUNITIES AS EXISTING AND CREATED: A STUDY OF ENTREPRENEURS IN THE SWEDISH MOBILE INTERNET INDUSTRY

The notion of opportunities is fast becoming a central theme in the field of entrepreneurship research. As part of this growing interest, the ontological status of opportunities has been scrutinized with researchers tending to view them as either objectively existing or socially created. In the present treatment, this ontological debate is partly avoided in favor of a phenomenological examination of Mobile Internet entrepreneurs, which naturally bridges these distinctions. The empirical findings are used to propose a framework in which opportunities are seen as both existing and created in the evolving set of perceptions and projections, sometimes fixed and sometimes mutable, that provide the cognitive and practical drivers needed to guide entrepreneurial action.