Creativity and prospection : creating and exploiting opportunities for international entrepreneurship

The increasing interest in international entrepreneurship calls for conceptual frameworks to better understand firm internationalisation. This paper explores an entrepreneur-firm-opportunity framework and advances an opportunity-based approach to international entrepreneurship. The role of the entrepreneur in the formation of international opportunities and the subjective dimensions of entrepreneurial creativity and a new construct of ‘prospectivity’ are examined. The firm – through its capabilities – is located as the vehicle for internationalisation and opportunity exploitation. The ‘opportunity’ construct is re-examined and the notion of the ‘entrepreneurial opportunity’ clarified. The paper shows how the entrepreneur orchestrates the dynamic interplay between firm capabilities and market opportunities to form entrepreneurial opportunities, leading to dimensions of opportunity formation processes and a Typology of Entrepreneurial Opportunity Processes (opportunity discovery, development, construction, and creation). Finally, the paper outlines how conceptualising internationalisation as the formation and exploitation of international entrepreneurial opportunities, and applying the opportunity-based approach to international entrepreneurship, can lead to a better understanding of the phenomenon of firm internationalisation.