What is an Attractive Business Opportunity? An Empirical Study of Opportunity Evaluation Decisions by Technologists, Managers, and Entrepreneurs

The subjective belief that an opportunity allows value generation is a key driver of entrepreneurial action. We advance research on opportunity evaluation by investigating how people may diverge in their views of what defines an attractive business opportunity; that is, we seek to understand heterogeneity among individuals' 'opportunity templates.' Using unique data from a conjoint experiment with 141 respondents (6,728 opportunity evaluations), our analysis reveals significant differences in the opportunity preferences of individuals with technological, management, and entrepreneurship experience. We also find that people with specialist experience (technology) emphasize fewer opportunity dimensions than people with generalist experience (management, entrepreneurship).