Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 5355 (2008)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej.39
DISCUSSANT COMMENTS
INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVITY, IMAGINATION,
AND OPPORTUNITIES
SHARON A. ALVAREZ
Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A.
INTRODUCTION
Who becomes an entrepreneur? Are entrepreneurs
different from nonentrepreneurs in some fundamen-
tal ways or are they essentially indistinguishable? If
differences do exist, do they exist prior to entrepre-
neurial actions or are differences in entrepreneurs
and nonentrepreneurs created by these actions? And
why has the search for these differences been so
important for those studying entrepreneurship?
One approach to these questions assumes that
opportunities are the result of competitive imper-
fections formed by exogenous changes to industries
or markets. These opportunities exist independent
of whether anyone discovers them or not. In a
view where opportunities are objective and exist,
everyone, in principle, could see and act on these
opportunities. The reason entrepreneurs see these
opportunitieswhile others do notis that entre-
preneurs are, in some manner, special or alert to
these objective opportunities. In this approach,
ex ante differences among entrepreneurs and non-
entrepreneurs can be seen as a central cause of the
exploitation of opportunities (Alvarez and Barney,
2007). This approach to opportunities is called the
discovery approach.
*Correspondence to: Sharon A. Alvarez, Fisher College of
Business, Ohio State University, 2100 Neil Avenue, #850,
Columbus, Ohio 43210, U.S.A.
E-mail: alvarez_42@cob.osu.edu
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society
DISCOVERY OPPORTUNITIES
The first article in this section takes the search for
differences between entrepreneurs and nonentrepre-
neurs to a biological level. In it, Nicolaou et al.
suggest that differences between entrepreneurs and
nonentrepreneurs exist because of genetic factors
that interact with environmental stimuli increasing
the likelihood that some will become entrepreneurs.
Genetic differences, in this view, are the source of
variation that influence psychological attributes that
might make some individuals more prone to become
entrepreneurs.
This is an intriguing article with an intriguing
sample3,454 twins, comprising of 870 pairs of
monozygotic twins and 857 pairs of same sex dizy-
gotic twins. They also assert that genes affect the
tendency of people to engage in entrepreneurship by
affecting the distribution of sensation seeking across
people. Moreover the question of whether genetics
can perhaps influence who becomes an entrepreneur
is intriguing. However, this work is still early and,
as the authors acknowledge, there are several limi-
tations, such as exactly what genes might influence
individuals to become entrepreneurs.
More broadly, this research raises some funda-
mental questions. For example, what if we do find
out that genetics influence who becomes an entre-
preneur? What advice do we give entrepreneurs?
What advice do we give those who want to become
entrepreneurs? How do we teach entrepreneurship?
Or do we stop giving advice, teaching, and so forth?
These fundamental questions about the genetic
54 S. A. Alvarez
components of entrepreneurship deserve ongoing
attention.
The second article, The emergence of team cre-
ative cognition: the role of diverse outside ties,
socio-cognitive network centrality, and team evolu-
tion, by Shalley and Perry-Smith focuses on pre-
existing knowledge and networks that are assumed
to have an impact on individual creativity, and
hence, entrepreneurial activity. To these authors, the
source of differences between creative individuals
and noncreative individuals is exposure to diverse
perspectives, ideas, experiences, norms, and so on
via social contacts that, in combination with existing
information and knowledge, result in creative solu-
tions to problems. Diverse social contacts trigger
individuals cognitive processes that translate into
creative thinking beyond a particular task domain
and into other settings.
This article ties creative thinking to the discov-
ery of opportunities. By introducing novelty in the
form of outside networks, this article suggests that
individuals may broaden their problem-solving
abilities by offering a greater variety of solutions.
However, what if pre-existing knowledge and infor-
mation actually hindered the process of opportunity
formation (Alvarez and Barney, 2007)? Moreover,
suppose pre-existing networks constrain individu-
als instead of enabling them to form opportunities
(Aldrich and Kim, 2007). One possible extension
to this article might be the understanding of when
pre-existing networks and knowledge enable oppor-
tunity formation and when they hinder opportunity
formation.
CREATION OPPORTUNITES
While the first two articles build on the assumption that
entrepreneurs are somehow different than nonentre-
preneurs ex ante to the opportunity formation process,
there is another alternative assumption. The logical
alternative to the assumption that unusual individuals
discover opportunities is that relatively undistinguish-
able individuals, ex ante, may become exceptional as
they engage in a process of creating the opportunities
they exploit (Alvarez and Barney, 2007).
The third article by Adner and Levinthal, Doing
versus seeing: acts of exploitation and perceptions of
exploration builds, at least partially, on this notion.
They suggest that, from the perspective of entre-
preneurs, search is always directed as entrepreneurs
pursue what are largely unseen or unvalued perfor-
mance dimensions. Those outside this search process
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society
may not understand that the entrepreneur is, indeed,
engaged in directed search since the opportunities
pursued by entrepreneurs may not be consistent with
the current goals and objectives of an organization.
These outsiders are unable to understand the value of
the opportunities that the entrepreneur is pursuing.
One of the main strengths of this article is that it
recognizes that many valuable and important oppor-
tunities are not seen as valuable until the entrepre-
neurs actions create that value. Moreover, this
article suggests that what may seem like irrational
behavior to some may be perfectly rational behavior
to the entrepreneur who is forming an opportunity.
However, this article seems to suggest that
the entrepreneur actually knows the value of this
unformed opportunity. This would suggest an infor-
mation asymmetry between the organization and the
entrepreneur that should be fairly easy to overcome.
What if the problem is not an information or knowl-
edge asymmetry, but instead, that the knowledge and
information needed to form the opportunity have not
yet been created? Or that there is limited knowledge
and information and it is not enough to overcome
asymmetries? In this case, the entrepreneurs actions
may, indeed, be quite purposeful and rational, even
though the entrepreneur does not fully understand
the value of the opportunity they are forming. This
search would not be to understand the performance
dimensions of the opportunitysince that may not
be possiblebut instead to realize that they are on
a different unknown dimension. In this view search
may simply mean, what is the next action?
All three of these articles attempt to understand
who forms opportunities and how they are formed.
However, the articles take very different approaches.
The first two try to understand differences in entre-
preneurs versus nonentrepreneurs that might lead
entrepreneurs to recognize or discover opportunities.
The third article tries to understand how differences
in opportunitiesperformance dimensionsmight
require different notions of what is rational search.
Both approaches have value. However, perhaps
the most value lies in recognizing that there are at
least two approaches to opportunity formation and
that the effectiveness of business processes varies
across these types of opportunities. This implies an
important research agenda for those interested in
examining how opportunities are exploited. That
agenda begins with developing empirical measures
of these different opportunities, continues with devel-
oping empirical measures of the effectiveness of
several different business processes, and concludes
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 5355 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/sej

by examining the relationship between opportunity
type and business process effectiveness.
CONCLUSION
The insight that there are different types of oppor-
tunities suggests that different strategies need to
be applied. Understanding that there are different
types of opportunities might even suggest that the
origin of strategies might be path dependent based
on opportunity type. Primarily, the field of strategic
management has focused on explaining returns from
implementing strategies, but not on where those strat-
egies come from in the first place (Barney, 1999).
However, as suggested by the Adner and Levinthal
article, the analysis of opportunities and where they
come from suggests that strategic management, as a
field, needs to begin to explore where opportunities
and strategies come from, and how these phenomena
are related to the business processes that are put into
place to exploit them.
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society
Commentary 55
REFERENCES
Adner R, Levinthal D. 2008. Doing versus seeing: acts of
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Entrepreneurship Journal 2(1): 4352.
Aldrich H, Kim PH. 2007. Small worlds, infinite possi-
bilities? How social networks affect entrepreneurial
team formation and search. Strategic Entrepreneurship
Journal 1(12): 147165.
Alvarez SA, Barney JB. 2007. Discovery and creation:
alternative theories of entrepreneurial action. Strategic
Entrepreneurship Journal 1(12): 1126.
Barney JB. 1999. How a firms capabilities affect bound-
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137.
Nicolaou N, Shane S, Cherkas L, Spector TD. 2008. The
influence of sensation seeking in the heritability of
entrepreneurship. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
2(1): 721.
Shalley CE, Perry-Smith JE. 2008. The emergence of team
creative cognition: the role of diverse outside ties, socio-
cognitive network centrality, and team evolution. Strate-
gic Entrepreneurship Journal 2(1): 2341.
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 5355 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/sej