SOCIAL NETWORKS AND OPPORTUNITY RECOGNITION: A CULTURAL COMPARISON BETWEEN TAIWAN AND THE UNITED STATES

摘要

A primary aspiration of strategic management scholars has been to identify factors that lead to competitive advantage (Hitt, Ireland, and Hoskisson, 2001). As a vital source of competitive advantage, opportunity—in particular the identification and exploitation of promising business opportunities—has become a key construct in the field of strategic management (Alvarez and Busenitz, 2001; Zahra and Dess, 2001). After all, effective strategic management is aimed at facilitating the identification of competitive opportunities not yet recognized or exploited (Ireland et al., 2001). In this study, we follow Baron (2006) in viewing opportunity identification as a cognitive process through which individuals strive to connectthe dots between changes, events, and trends so as to come up with new product or service ideas.Most of the research on opportunity identification agrees on the key role of information (e.g., Kirzner, 1997; Ozgen and Baron, 2007; Shane, 2000). In particular, drawing on Austrian economics, Shane (2000) asserts that opportunity identification is a function of the distribution of information in society. Similarly, Fiet (1996) proposes an information-based model of entrepreneurial discovery suggesting that the acquisition of relevant and specific information is the antecedent of opportunity discovery. Those ideas resonate with Kirzner's (1997) argument that opportunities are not obvious to all individuals, which suggests a critical role for information in opportunity discovery.Because information is distributed according to the unique life circumstances of each person (Venkataraman, 1997), social networks determine what information individuals have access to. In fact, as the most significant source of information (Johannisson, 1990), social networks have