The Journey from Core Idea to Business: Opportunity Development and Exploitation of a Start-Up Venture Creation Process

As the failure rate of start-ups is high and entrepreneurs face a vast amount of challenges, it is vital to find new ways how entrepreneurs could develop their ideas faster, with better end results, and with less wasted effort. This paper presents a novel theoretical framework of the start-up venture creation process, emphasis on the opportunity development and exploitation, and preliminary findings of the empirical research. The suggested framework is used to empirically study entrepreneurial journeys and the different kinds of critical incidents and events which have forced the business idea or the opportunity to be reconfigured or possibly innovated into a new form. The research will give a deeper understanding and possible patterns of this event based process, and suggests how to improve the start-up venture development process. The research methodology is a qualitative, exploratory, event-driven, narrative study using narrative inquiry to interview digital technology start-up founders in different start-up ecosystems. Recent studies show, the opportunity development and exploitation process of start-up ventures is a complex and dynamic process, and often happening through trial and error. The developed framework draws upon the view of entrepreneurship as a process and as a journey, circumstantial to time, space, and context, and shows how opportunity development cycles that are triggered by critical incidents and can lead to the creation or abortion of the process. The framework and the choices of the research are based on models which include the review of the following literature: entrepreneurial and new venture creation process, opportunity in relevant ways, entrepreneurial growth and stages, narrative approach in entrepreneurship, reasons for failure and survival of new ventures. Preliminary findings include themes of the critical events found, the actions triggered of these incidents, the time span of the journey, and the lessons learned.