Opportunity Identification and Stakeholder Enrollment Under Conditions of Risk and Uncertainty

There is continuing interest in the actions that entrepreneurs can take to create and exploit opportunities. Two of these actions— identifying opportunities and enrolling stakeholders to help exploit these opportunities—have received particular attention. On the one hand, the process of opportunity identification can enable entrepreneurs to understand the scope and dimensions of an opportunity and, in some settings, to estimate the profit potential of exploiting that opportunity. On the other hand, the process of stakeholder enrollment can enable an entrepreneur to gain access to the resources necessary to exploit an opportunity. Little prior work has focused on how the context within which these processes unfold can affect them. There is even less work on how this context can affect the relationship between opportunity identification and stakeholder enrollment. This paper examines these two related issues by examining the opportunity identification and stakeholder enrollment processes under conditions of risk and uncertainty. The paper asserts that under conditions of risk, opportunity identification is most effective before stakeholder enrollment; while under conditions of uncertainty, stakeholder enrollment occurs before the opportunity is identified. Propositions are developed regarding the actions and process of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and stakeholder enrollment under conditions of risk and uncertainty.