According to Drucker, successful innovation results from careful analysis of the sources of new opportunities. Drucker (1998) argues that most innovations – specific functions of entrepreneurship – result from the purposeful search for opportunities. Not everyone agrees that opportunity often can be found by surprise, however. Zambrano built the Alpha Travel Agency into a thriving $5.5 million business. “But then I thought, well, why not?” ( Mangi, 2001). I had never even thought about this,” she says. “I didn’t have the money or the experience. Just 3 weeks later the owner, who was a fellow Colombian, offered to sell her the business. But, 2 years later, she seized the chance to help out an acquaintance in a local travel reservations office. At the beginning, she spent most of her time learning English, in the hope of continuing her college studies. She came from Colombia to the United States to marry her husband in Worcester, MA in 1990. This situation is well represented by the case of Yolanda Zambrano. He found that entrepreneurs were surprised by the opportunities that they discovered, and that their opportunity discovery process was often attributed to serendipity. Shane (2000), on the one hand, argues that people can and will discover entrepreneurial opportunities without actively searching for them. This has led to two quite different perspectives on opportunity finding. Yet, given the importance of opportunity finding for entrepreneurs, studies focusing on the opportunity finding process are rare, and have produced equivocal results ( Yitshaki and Kropp, 2018). And often, if individuals can identify true opportunities, others will provide resources so those opportunities can be exploited ( Shane and Cable, 2002 Joardar et al., 2014). Once individuals possess worthwhile opportunities, they can begin the entrepreneurial process. Indeed, opportunity finding stands at the center of entrepreneurship (e.g., Shane and Venkataraman, 2000), representing the most distinctive and fundamental entrepreneurial behavior ( Yitshaki and Kropp, 2016). Instead, “what is stopping them is that what they’ve got is not truly an opportunity – it is a bad idea” (2003: 5). Stevenson argues that the main reason a potential entrepreneur doesn’t pursue an opportunity is not, as is often claimed, lack of money.
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