The Importance of the Entrepreneurial Background in the Detection and the Utilization of the Information

The main cause of the entrepreneurship is the detection of the entrepreneurial opportunity. The most important factors that can influence the way by which the opportunities are recognized are firstly the degree of vigilance and reaction of the entrepreneur in the information and secondly the fact that only few entrepreneur possess a useful and important information at a specific moment. How much easy or random is to somebody have this information and how many his entrepreneurial past does contribute in this direction? Many researchers have formulated the opinion that the entrepreneur needs knowledge in order to recognize the entrepreneurial opportunity and this knowledge comes from his personal background, his education, his working experience and from the empirical knowledge of the field for which he is interested. In this paper we try to investigate and to connect the entrepreneurial past and background either of a company or of an entrepreneur with their ability to evaluate information and through these to detect entrepreneurial opportunities. This study includes a quantitative research that was held and focused in Greek Small and Medium-sized enterprises in the construction industry. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection peer-review under responsibility of The 2nd International Conference on Integrated Information