Opportunity Recognition in Entrepreneurial Teams. Discussion Processes and Creative Outcomes

Masters Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Company formation, Business Plans, grade: 1,0, Technical University of Munich (TUM School of Management), language: English, abstract: This thesis is approaching this issue of opportunity recognition based on team creative cognition and a product-oriented view at creativity, and thus at how the team discussion process of idea-generation is shaping entrepreneurial opportunities. Substantial gains can be made by entrepreneurial teams when recognizing promising business ideas. Academic research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and cognition has thus recently focused on how entrepreneurial teams generate business ideas and opportunities in order to understand the team decision processes of recognizing original and feasible opportunities. Therefore, creativity (original and feasible outcome) in its multifaceted cognitive manner plays an essential role in generating ideas. However, empirical research on the influence of entrepreneurial team cognition (ETC) on the generation, recognition, and configuration of such ideas is still lacking. Based on existing literature in creative cognition the entire idea-generation process is operationalized through convergent and divergent thinking phases and analyzed through conducting a quantitative experiment to examine possible relationships between the created variables. It turns out, that in convergent thinking, entrepreneurial teams generated and recognized less original but more feasible idea sets and final opportunities. In this regard, divergent thinking has an enhancement effect on original sets of ideas. These first findings are finally discussed against the background of ETC and shown to help to facilitate entrepreneurship research in this context to new insights separated from personal creativity skills, and further to assist entrepreneurs in recognizing opportunities in a practical way.