Making sense of firm’s prior experience in the emergence of opportunities: The quest of a project-based supplier from local infrastructure towards offshore wind

This paper investigates how new business opportunities emerge for established firms in a project-based context. It builds on the notion of technological exaptation to explain how the prior experience of project-based organizations interacts with opportunities for market diversification. Current studies have lacked in-depth and processual examination of how market diversification unfolds. Literature has also overlooked the particular challenges brought about by project-based organizations in this process. These firms are particularly subject to entrepreneurial dynamics, given the discontinuous and temporary nature of their activities. This work consists of a retrospective case study of a Danish supplier of steel-structures to the offshore wind power industry. Preliminary findings suggest that prior experiences foster the creation of an exaptive pool for potentially new opportunities. Agents within and across the firm assess the fitness between the capabilities and resources embedded in the exaptive pool and the perceived characteristics of context. When there is fitness, these are exapted as means for addressing a new opportunity. This work extends entrepreneurship literature of opportunities; its main contributions are: (i) offering empirical evidence of how exaptation takes place in organizations; (ii) unpacking of the notion of entrepreneurial innovation; (iii) illuminating the role of luck and foresight, as well as the locus of foreseeing agents.

Til publikasjon: https://hdl.handle.net/11250/4141806 | Publiseringsår: 2016 | Tidsskrift: