Entrepreneurial opportunity stimulates action. Does it only stimulate entrepreneurs to action? Or to non-entrepreneurs as well? What it is, and what it is not? Who is an entrepreneur? The concept of opportunity has been a bedrock in entrepreneurship research since Shane and Venkataraman’s seminal work in 2000. Researchers have explored the emergence, the role and the purpose of opportunity since then. Despite more than two decades of scholarship on the construct that has moved us well beyond what Shane and Venkataraman originally defined and with seminal papers that have moved us toward a better and more sophisticated understanding of the opportunity, we are still asking who an entrepreneur is? Ramoglou, Gartner and Tsang argue that this is the wrong question. The definitional varieties and fragments move Davidsson to suggest dismantling the construct and re-contextualising it with a more suitable and coherent framework. Foss and Klein suggest doing away with the opportunity concept altogether. This paper articulates that opportunity still provides a fundamental scaffold to organise entrepreneurial research. We propose that opportunity exists as an artificial imaginative construct in the minds of entrepreneurs. We argue that the concept of an imagined opportunity can overcome the fragmented definitions with an elasticity that can clarify and sharpen its utilitarian value. This paper aims to shift the dialogue on how opportunity emerges, exists and changes according to the information presented and subjectively interpreted through mental visualisation/imagination.

Entrepreneurship researches have been curiously silent on luck since luck, itself is elusive and cannot be systematically quantified in any meaningful measurement. An explicit and systematic evaluation of where luck is situated along the spectrum of certainty to absolute uncertainty will be undertaken in this paper. Exploration on the social construction of luck, effect of luck, human interventions relating to luck; the discussion on the operationalization of luck will open potentially rich veins of theoretical inquiry premising on quantum uncertainties, chaos theory, Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Weick’s sensemaking. Heisenberg uncertainty principle or Knightian’s uncertainty or the chaos theory, they are not competing alternatives and irreconcilable as they are not dealing with the same aspect of the indeterministic phenomenon. This paper will explore the indeterminacy of luck along the processual pathway of entrepreneurial venturing. It concludes by offering a compelling proposition on opportunistic and propitious timing with regards to the eventual rewards.

This paper reviews the concept of entrepreneurial actions arising from the opportunities using signalling theory as the building blocks to discuss the process from perception, recognition to enactment. By adopting a dynamic approach to study how entrepreneurs see opportunities, particularly the initial opportunities beliefs, over time, beliefs change. The perceived potentialities from the signals arising from opportunities also change. Strength of the initial opportunity beliefs, morph-ability of opportunities, frequency of opportunity appearances, multiple interpretations of opportunity, latency of opportunity, observability (intensity, visibility, strength and clarity), distortions of opportunity and false opportunity are topics that are scarcely addressed in entrepreneurial opportunities studies. We argue that the signalling effects open new veins of inquiry related to opportunity and entrepreneurial actions. Instead of seeing opportunity from either the discovery or creation approaches, opportunity should be viewed as opportunity-as-artefact with embedded perceived potentialities.

Entrepreneurship concerns actions under uncertainties. Situated within that uncertainties are opportunities that entrepreneurs seek. How are these opportunities seen? Within the entrepreneurial opportunities are seeds with potentialities. Potentialities for profits. They are the reasons that entrepreneurs act up to exploit and to set in motion the entrepreneurial emergence. The intentionality follows with construction of a coherent set of activities or incoherent intuitive moves to pursue the opportunity, including injecting resources and mobilizing social and material networks. How are opportunities discovered, and perceived? The current academic debates feature discovery and creation. Are they existing independently, with pre-existing reality, even without being observed? Or as some argued that opportunities are not pre-existing in space and time with an objective existence but are subjectively and socially constructed. On contact with such opportunities, what spur entrepreneurs to act and what are the forces at work? Are they real or artificial? Can they be holographic representation and provide cues and signals to entrepreneurs to act? Can opportunity-as-hologram explains how entrepreneurs get inspired and motivated to pursuing the opportunities? This paper will explore, revisit and recast perspectives on opportunities and addressing the subtle conceptual issues at the core of entrepreneurship theories that hold the two views, discovery and creation of opportunities to be both valid and mutually non-exclusive, on holographic terms. In the discussion, this paper will explore implicate order and explicate order which are quantum theory concepts theorized by physicist David Bohm as these theories were developed to explain the bizarre and unpredictable behaviours of subatomic particles, which have strong semblance to the same free-spiritedness and free-will self-organization behaviours of entrepreneurs. Our theorization will have implications for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial researches relating to quantum science references.

Up until now, entrepreneurship study has not developed a unified theory with key concepts that can elucidate the holistically process-driven characteristics of entrepreneurial venturing. What spur entrepreneurs to action along the process-driven pathway? This paper intends to relate the business of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial actions and activities to thermodynamic and energy gradient-manipulation mechanism. Taking entrepreneurial venturing from a process view and in an attempt to reconstruct the entrepreneurial process by illustrating a range of relevant perspectives from energy gradients in naturally occurring chemical , biological and physical systems basing on interpretive and phenomenological, social constructionist angle; this paper hopes to pull together a unifying theory on action-based activities in entrepreneurial venturing with thermodynamic concepts and expressions with gradient-manipulation mechanism to explain the entrepreneurial action-motion phenomena. The gradient-manipulating mechanism and thermodynamic expressions thus become the “nature” invisible hand that operates the motion of actions. Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship explains the coordination of markets and of knowledge. It is that knowledge, the recognition of the opportunities in the actual imperfect markets that triggers the gradient-manipulation mechanism.

Time is not invariant in the entrepreneurial journey. Timing is everything in entrepreneurial venturing. This paper shifts the inquiry of entrepreneurship from micro (traits, characteristics and behaviour) and macro (environmental context) perspective and the multi-level approaches from discovery, creation to co-creation (Garud et al., 2014) to a study of the relevance of time in the entrepreneurial pathway development. The context of luck or exogenous change or external or internal perturbation that may lead to the propitious time to act will be examined with reference to research conducted by Peter R. Darke (Darke & Freedman, 1997). It needs contextualization to fit the entrepreneurial paradigm on the propitious time to enact (Weick & Karl E, 1995) which is the main conceptualization in this paper. The concept of convergence, in a particular spatial-temporal (space-time), between the opportunity and the entrepreneur, is the core of this study and this paper will focus specifically on the extent and nature of this convergence in relation to time. Propitious time to trigger actions when opportunities surface or avoidance when the scale of risks are too large to bear- this study of when to act is therefore central to the theory of entrepreneurship.

The space within which the entrepreneurs exist is filled with risks, opportunities and other environmental resources. Scholars have argued that entrepreneurs are constantly discovering and identifying value potentials because significant values arise from the existence of positive externalities which can be captured and exploited. Positive externalities or opportunities can create substantial and desirable gains if they can be monetized, leveraged and exploited. These externalities refer to the natural environmental resources within the space where the entrepreneurs operate (Hoogendoorn et al., 2019). From the perspective of space, this paper will explore the emergence of opportunities or risks within the space through the theoretical lens of structuration and complex science and will specifically discuss the collision and the meeting of opportunities with the entrepreneurs at the nexus from the perspective of entrepreneurial energy excitation. Entrepreneurship originates from a nexus of individuals and opportunities (Shane, 2003). The unique juncture in space or nexus in which the entrepreneurs and opportunities exist is central to the study of entrepreneurship because it is in this juncture or nexus that identification and evaluation of risks and opportunities take place. It is the subsequent human actions, driven by the level of entrepreneurial energy that will lead to the myriad of possible venture pathways. For risks, entrepreneurs perceive them and will subsequent work towards mitigation or avoidance through varied measures. The exploitation of opportunities is concerned with acquiring and employing resources in the space to gain certain advantages. Likewise, with risks, entrepreneurs perceive the risks and work towards the mitigation or avoidance of the perceived risk in the venture pathways. In this paper, entrepreneurship is viewed through structuration and complexity science lens to present the entrepreneurial venture as the instantiated outcome of the entrepreneur–opportunity interaction through time and space (Sarason et al., 2006). Complexity science offers a theoretical lens for exploring the complex interdependencies of a complex, and adaptive pluralistic world with irreversibility and randomness being the rules- a dynamical systems in the natural and physical worlds. The key central concept of complexity is that interactivities between parts of open systems that creates unpredictable and seemingly random patterns. While the history of the open system is relevant in understanding its dynamics, the specific isolation of individual part of the system does not reveal the casual mechanisms in the system (Fuller & Moran, 2001). The paper explores whether how entrepreneurial energy arise from the convergence/ collision of entrepreneurs with opportunities in a dynamical, unpredictable and random way in a nexus in space.

Disequilibrium, and complexity are the distinguishing characteristics of entrepreneurial phenomena. How do the entrepreneurs arbitrage, leverage and benefit in the disequilibria and what spur them to action? The force that drives entrepreneurial ventures, from creation to sustaining them through to exit, and then through innovation to extend the game or recreate another play, there is an imminent force that holds and sustains entrepreneurial momentum. Entrepreneurial energy, a coined terminology in this paper, is that endogenous force. There are scarce researches on energy relating to entrepreneurship, in particular, there is no specific mention of the “entrepreneurial energy” in the theory of entrepreneurship. The closest proxy is entrepreneurial passions. Passion cannot be held in equal doses throughout the venture pathway. John Maynard Keynes coined the phrase “animal spirits” in his 1936 book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”. (Keynes, 1936) He used the term to describe emotions that influence human economic behaviour. Animal spirits create an ambience of trust and faith and are a necessary prerequisite for human actions, much more than quantitative logic. Keynes felt animal spirits were needed as a goad to economic action rather than inaction. Schumpeter (Schumpeter, 1942) came up with the German word Unternehmergeist, meaning entrepreneur-spirit, adding that these individuals controlled the economy because they are responsible for delivering innovation and technological change. Whether its entrepreneurial energy, animal spirit or entrepreneur-spirit, it is a force that needs reckoning with in entrepreneurship study. Entrepreneurial energy is the force that sustains the momentum and velocity of progression in the venture. Energy can rise through excitation/ agitation and fall through decay of the energy as a result of predicaments or failures. Entrepreneurial energy is an endogenous force that fuels motivation and sustains entrepreneurial action and momentum. Encapsulating hope, optimism and obsessiveness, the nature and experience of the entrepreneurial energy provides meaning to the entrepreneurial pursuit and venture. Entrepreneurial energy is a motivational construct characterised by positive intense feeling, emotional arousal and internal drive and engagement in the pursuit that is salient to the self-identify of the entrepreneur. The positive affective state also generates positivity in the cognitive state fostering creativity and recognition of new patterns of information critical to opportunity recognition and exploitation in the external environment. Entrepreneurship, after all, is a science of turbulence and change, not continuity. Turbulence is caused by certain force. Such is the force in entrepreneurship, like the wind is felt but not seen; or seen through the ruffle of the leaves but not the wind itself. To address this omission in this area of research, this paper will demonstrate that entrepreneurial energy can be better understood if examined through the lens of complexity and quantum science. The indeterminacy in uncertainties and chaos theories best describe the dynamically complex, fast, volatile, uncertain disrupted, diverse, ambiguous, hyper-turbulent and hyperconnected entrepreneurial ecosystem. This paper contributes to entrepreneurship research by developing a complexity-based and uncertainty-based definition of entrepreneurial energy. This energy will be referred in the context of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (space) where the entrepreneurs (object) exist over time. Building on this definition, this paper connects the research on entrepreneur to venture-level complexity and entrepreneurial multi-finalities/ pathways. This paper will explore how these force originates and is sustained- that will influence entrepreneurial emergence and continuation- from intentionality of entrepreneurs and the coherence of entrepreneurial activities, through to the exploration and exploitation of perceived opportunities within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Beyond developing the theory, this paper will also explore how scholars can further examine entrepreneurial energy as a complex play of forces through interpretivist methods. The theorizations in this paper also have implications for entrepreneurs and policymakers.