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This paper analyzes the motivations of eight female Afghan entrepreneurs to start up their own business and the problems they encountered during start-up and operations. Income generation was the most important push factor but pull factors including desire for independence and autonomy were also important. However, in contrast to studies in other countries, the desire for achievement was not emphasized. An unexpected finding was the emphasis on the desire to help non-family members by running a business. The main problems included financial problems during start-up and operations, lack of contacts and security during operations. Gender-specific problems included limited market, mobility constraints and negative attitudes and lack of social acceptance for female entrepreneurs. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings.

To better understand and explain processes of economic transformation, this paper proposes a new concept, “innovative opportunities”. Our interpretation of opportunities is based on an understanding of innovation in a business context, stressing perception and uncertainty during the choices involved in innovation processes. Based on Schumpeterian views of economic transformation, innovative opportunities refer to a set of different elements within the processes whereby actors identify, act upon and realize new combinations of resources and market needs to try to benefit from their future economic potential. To better understand and explain such processes, the proposed conceptualization of “innovative opportunities” consists of three elements: (1) economic value; (2) mobilization of resources; and (3) appropriability, which goes beyond existing types of opportunity conceptualizations found in the literature. The concluding discussion returns to the question of how this view of innovative opportunities modifies the existing understanding of innovation activities and industrial dynamics, and helps us identify new areas of research.Technological opportunities, entrepreneurial opportunities, economic value, resource mobilization, appropriability,

The paper analyses the development of newly started bioscience firms in terms of their capabilities and changes in their business models. The study consists of eight retrospective case studies stemming from their foundation over a period of 5-15 years. Empirically the paper finds that all the firms quickly develop a technological capability at the time of their foundation, and over time all firms added distinctly new business capabilities. Seven firms radically changed their business models by identifying and exploiting new opportunities by drawing on their existing business capability combined with a new, different technological capability. The initial technological capability -the firms' 'ticket to entry' -does not seem to be relevant to explain the process of firm development. These initial technological capabilities are surprisingly seldom leveraged within the cumulative process of opening up additional opportunities and business models. The paper concludes by creating a model and discusses some reasons for the findings.