Opportunities approach to international entrepreneurship

Abstract

The notion of opportunity is today at the core of international business (IB) and international entrepreneurship (IE), with the latter domain now conceptualised as the pursuit of international opportunities across borders (Reuber et al., 2018). Research on opportunities represented an emergent area within IE until a decade ago (Jones et al., 2011). The more recent review of Mainela et al. (2014) confirms that interest in the opportunity concept had increased significantly by the latter part of the 1989–2012 period. This chapter explains the underlying assumptions of an opportunities approach to IE, integrates ideas from the seminal theories within IB and IE, while arguing for a focus on the central role of international opportunities in explaining entrepreneurial internationalisation.