This article extends and elaborates the perspective on entrepreneurship articulated by Shane and Venkataraman (2000) and Venkataraman (1997) by explaining in more detail the role of opportunities in the entrepreneurial process. In particular, the article explains the importance of examining entrepreneurship through a disequilibrium framework that focuses on the characteristics and existence of entrepreneurial opportunities. In addition, the article describes several typologies of opportunities and their implications for understanding entrepreneurship.

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Using a random sample of 221 new Swedish ventures initiated in 1998, we examine why some new ventures are more likely than others to successfully be awarded capital from external sources. We examine venture financing as a staged selection process in which two sequential selection events systematically winnow the population of ventures and influence which ventures receive financing. For a venture to receive external financing its founders must first select it as a candidate for external funding, and then a financier must fund it. We find evidence that founders select ventures as candidates for external finance based on their perceptions of market competition, market growth, and employment growth, while financiers base funding decisions on objective verifiable indicators of venture development, such as the completion of organizing activities, marketing activities, and the level of sales of the venture. Our findings have implications for venture financing and evolutionary theories of social processes.venture financing, entrepreneurship, evolutionary theory

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Research Summary Companies sponsor platform ecosystems as an open innovation strategy to encourage complementors to develop complementary products, services, or technologies that can add value to the platform ecosystem. In this study, we develop and test an information‐based theory of entrepreneurial activity within platform ecosystems. We postulate that ecosystems produce different types of information—a subset of which will foster entrepreneurship in the form of the commercialization of complementary products that were previously released for free. Our results indicate that product‐specific information is associated with commercialization, but we fail to detect a relationship between market information and subsequent commercialization activity. Managerial Summary The digital economy has led to a proliferation of platform ecosystems that harness external innovation. These ecosystems rely on complementors who enhance the value of platforms by creating complementary technologies. Hence, complementors' commercial viability is important. One such type of ecosystem is an app store, which enables complementors to introduce software that improves the platform product. App stores exist for a variety of software platforms, ranging from mobile phone operating systems (iOS and Android) to electronic medical record systems (Epic and Cerner). In this research, we find that complementors who introduce a free version of a mobile app are more likely to commercialize their app in response to specific types of information and platform designers should manage information in their platforms to foster platform viability.