A Path From an Idea to a Venture: Opportunity Types and Venture Survival

This study focuses on the search process of founding teams pursuing four types of opportunities ""after start-up"". Also, we consider the entrepreneurial process instead of entrepreneurial actions in discrete phases of entrepreneurship (opportunity identification, evaluation, and exploitation) to provide integral insights. Founding teams exploiting technology-driven opportunities start from a technology (means) and search for a market (goal) to apply it to, while founding teams exploiting operation-driven, use-driven, and hybrid-driven opportunities begin with an underserved market demand (goal) and seek a technological solution (means) to satisfy the unmet need. Funding teams exploiting different types of opportunities rely on different types of knowledge (market experience, technology knowledge, or personal frustration) as a basis for venture creation. Thus, founding teams need to engage in a different level of technological and market search to achieve initial success. Based on a qualitative study with seven founding teams of new medical equipment ventures in the mobile health industry in the U.S., we found that the type of opportunity which founding teams exploit determines their ways and their priority of knowledge search in the exploitation phases after start-up: specifying, resourcing, tweaking. In addition, the initial knowledge that founding teams are based on has a different level of fungibility, which influences the strategic actions that the teams may apply to exploit opportunities.