Entrepreneurial actions and resource application: An inductive study of entrepreneurial processes

Researchers have long conceptualized entrepreneurship as a process. Nevertheless, the extant literature lacks an integral understanding of micro- foundations of entrepreneurial phenomena to identify opportunity ideas and turn them to real business. In this paper, we focus on the "entrepreneurial process" and aim to empirically understand how individual entrepreneurial motivations determine the formation of their opportunity beliefs and how motivations and beliefs jointly direct new ventures’ opportunity exploitation. The results show that in an almost homogeneous environment, namely the nascent market of mobile health medical devices, entrepreneurs with different motivations take different paths to identify opportunities. We indicate three motivational forces for new venture creation: Technology-driven forces, operation-driven forces, and user-driven forces. Different motivational forces lead entrepreneurs identify and evaluate opportunities differently. Different entrepreneurial motivations also initiate diverse cognitive processes to interpret which resources are going to be transformed to which applications and how to complete the transformation. The diverse cognitive processes lead new ventures to conduct different opportunity exploitation strategies (e.g., pivoting strategies, diversification strategies, and business model refinement).