Founder’s multiple identities of Swedish business owners with athlete background in entrepreneurial opportunity recognition process

Evansluong, Quang

Abstract

The phenomenon of people having the same background, education, professional experience and prior knowledge recognizing the same entrepreneurial opportunities and establishing same types of businesses in the same industry seem to be quite popular. For example, people working as IT engineers are prone to realize the same entrepreneurial opportunities and establish their own firms in IT industry or people earning law degrees might establish law firms or athletes competing in bodybuilding might run their own gyms or establish their own nutrition companies or even their own clothing lines or Turkish people in Sweden are prone to run kebab or pizza restaurants. In fact the reasons why certain groups of people recognizing the same entrepreneurial opportunities and act on those, from previous research, can be explained by their same cultural background, education, and professional experience,social networks and information flows(Singh,2000; Ardichvili, Cardozo, Ray, 2003; Vaghely & Julien, 2010; Zahra, Korri & Yu, 2005). However, extant research in this field has under-explored how identity influences the opportunity recognition process as to explain why certain groups of people having commonalities in terms of professions or backgrounds or education identify the same business opportunities and decide to turn those opportunities into established businesses. This paper aims to explore how founder’s multiple identities influence the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition process. To be specific, it aims to study the influence of founder’s group identification, specifically, peer pressure/influence, occupational identity on opportunity recognition process. An individual can be a member of different social groups. Due to globalization facilitating mobility of international transportation and information exchange, group identification is expanded not only to national but also to international dimension. This means that an individual could belong to a local social network, a national social network or an international social network. The groups could be local ones gathering members in the neighborhood areas or could be national ones gathering members from all over the countries or can be even international ones attracting members from different countries. The founder’s group identification and

Citation

Evansluong, Q. (2013, August). Founder’s multiple identities of Swedish business owners with athlete background in entrepreneurial opportunity recognition process. Paper presented at McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference 2013, Montreal, Canada

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference 2013
• Conference Location: Montreal, Canada
• Start Date: Aug 2, 2013
• End Date: Aug 5, 2013
• Acceptance Date: Aug 2, 2013
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2013
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: founder multiple identities, opportunity recognition, entrepreneurial process, athlete identity, sport entrepreneurship
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/937902
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference 2013