Introduction: Opportunity Development in Business Networks

During the last few decades entrepreneurship has attracted a growing interest in both the business world and academia. It seems to be a general agreement that accelerating technological development and globalization require that national economies and industries grow rapidly enough to be competitive in this new world order. It is also believed that entrepreneurship is critical in promoting the necessary industrial growth and development. Opportunity is one of the core concepts in the entrepreneurship literature since it is generally assumed that opportunity seeking has a central role in entrepreneurship. The objective of this volume is to explore some issues in the landscape of business opportunity. Our exploration aims at examining business opportunity in a network perspective. The reasons are that cooperative inter-firm networks are frequently said to be effective in managing the forces of technological development and globalization, and that research has demonstrated that firms are engaged in networks of interconnected relationships.