45 1. A brief history of the idea of opportunity* William B. Gartner, Bruce T. Teague, Ted Baker and R. Daniel Wadhwani INTRODUCTION Entrepreneurship, by its nature, is about genesis – ‘In the beginning . . .’ (Hillman, 1987): the process of creation (be it manifest through an idea, thing, group, organization, community, market, or society) is ontologi- cally about beginnings. Origins matter. So, when we focus on the begin- nings of any phenomenon, we tend to look for ‘a beginning’ rather than get bogged down in trying to figure out what might have happened before it began. The problem of genesis is that a beginning does not have a ‘pre-beginning’. Or does it? Can there be a history to something before it began? We tend to set a marker for when something begins, and start there, rather than consider what might become an infinite regression backwards in time: from pre-beginning, to pre-pre-beginning, to pre-pre- pre-beginning . . . And this is often where history finds itself. When do we begin with the history of an idea? The history of the idea of opportunity in entrepreneurship scholarship has a ‘beginning’ problem. When did ‘opportunity’ become an essen- tial part of the definition of entrepreneurship? While the fulcrum point of scholarship on the importance of opportunity to entrepreneurship seems to pivot with the publication of Shane and Venkataraman’s ‘The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research’ in the Academy of Management Review in 2000, was this article the beginning of research and thought on opportunity, itself? While Shane and Venkataraman point to some prior scholarship on the idea of opportunity (e.g. Schumpeter, 1934; Drucker, 1985/2014; Casson, 1982; Baumol, 1993; Kirzner, 1997), many scholars have resorted to using the Shane and Venkataraman (2000) article as the beginning of their thought about the nature of opportunity as the key characteristic of entrepreneurship (cf. Alvarez and Barney, 2007; McMullen et al., 2007; Plummer et al., 2007; Shepherd et al., 2007). This gambit seems to be, from our point of view, a bit shortsighted. The intention of this chapter is to explore this question: What was William B. Gartner, Bruce T. Teague, Ted Baker and R. Daniel Wadhwani - 9781783475445 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 06/30/2020 11:10:03PM via free access