To Find or Not to Find: How Do Opportunity Identification Cognitions Differ by Task?

Opportunity identification is a core concept in entrepreneurship research and it is considered by many to be the most distinctive and fundamental of entrepreneurial behaviors (e.g., Gaglio, 1997; Venkataraman, 1997, Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). Opportunity identification researchers have assumed that opportunity identification is a cognitive task and cognitive explanations of opportunity identification, to date, have often focused on the suggestion that entrepreneurs have a distinctive set of perceptual and information-processing skills related to entrepreneurial alertness (Gaglio & Katz, 2001). Gaglio & Katz (2001) further apply a cognitive lens by suggesting that observed behavioral differences in opportunity identification may reflect differences in schema content and complexity between alert individuals and nonalert individuals, and propose 11 hypotheses relating to these differences. These hypotheses are not tested, leaving a significant gap in the literature.