Opportunity Recognition – State of the Art und Forschungsperspektiven

The widespread acknowledgement of opportunity recognition as the distinctive attribute of entrepreneurship has led to increased research in this field. Published articles reveal a high level of heterogeneity and thus raise the demand for a review of current research on opportunity recognition. This article is aimed at providing a comprehensive and systematic overview of the existing research published between 1995 and 2006. Therefore theoretical as well as empirical research is reported and evaluated with regard to content and methodology. Furthermore, distinctive research avenues are identified. As a result four different schools of opportunity recognition are proposed: the human capital school, the cognitive school, the social capital/network school, and the learning school. Additionally a category for school-overlapping articles is introduced. The overview of the literature on opportunity recognition suggests as a next possible step the usefulness of a more qualitative approach to shed light on the diffuse concept of ‘opportunity’ itself.