Opportunity development: a tale with many beginnings

This paper advances a process model of opportunity development. It uses an inductive methodology and phasic analysis to map-out the event sequences contained in the narratives of recent entrepreneurs on the development of their businesses. We identify six overarching phases that constitute the building blocks of the opportunity development process: origin, trigger, pre-commitment, commitment, incremental management cycle, and breakaway. The overall process map suggests that opportunity development cannot always assume prescient intentionality. There are different paths that lead to formal commitment to the entrepreneurial journey, not all marked by prescient intentionality. In such case, what makes the process entrepreneurial is where it ends rather than where it starts.