Las oportunidades de negocio ¿se reconocen o se construyen?

This paper tries to answer the question of whether business opportunities did already exist before being recognized and are simply recognized or must be crafted from scratch. The author also considers whether business opportunities are recognized by serendipity or after a systematic research constrained to the entrepreneur’s prior knowledge. Finally, whether such prior knowledge is or is not a pre‐requisite for business opportunity recognition is also considered. The research consists of a study of five cases. In all of them, the entrepreneur’s prior knowledge was a pre‐requisite for their business opportunities. In four cases, the business opportunity was identified after a systematic research constrained to the entrepreneur’s prior knowledge. In the remaining case, the business opportunity was identified by serendipity. In three of the cases, the opportunity did not exist and had to be crafted from scratch. In the other two cases, the opportunity did already exist before. The main research conclusion states that crafting a business opportunity from scratch has to do with the business model design through trial‐and error experimentation.