ENTREPRENEURS AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE OPPORTUNITY PROCESS

Entrepreneurship is one of the main debate topics nowadays, motivated by aspects such as economic growth and development, welfare and profit. Through their activity, entrepreneurs - the driving force in the market process - contribute to world progress. Literature view entrepreneurial opportunities as the foundation for entrepreneurial activities. In the free market context, the identification, discovery or creation of entrepreneurial opportunities is the basis of the entrepreneur's activity. The implications of opportunities in the global economy are evident. The starting point for entrepreneurship is opportunity, irrespective of its shape or type, whether identified, created or discovered. The opportunity process is influenced by aspects such as information asymmetry, level of knowledge, level of technology, etc. Although the existing literature is far from developing a solid theory on entrepreneurial opportunities, the main aim of this paper is to make a review of the existing opinions on this topic. The different approaches were indicative of the complexity of the entrepreneurial opportunities process and the difficulty in understanding the concept. Methodologically, this paper is based on descriptive and exploratory literature review on the topic of entrepreneurial opportunities. The limitations of this paper result from the small number of the articles we analysed and lack of a quantitative approach, but these arguments also constitute a direction for future research.