4 Knowledge Corridor & Escaping It

importance of prior knowledge

individuals are not equally likely to recognize a given entrepreneurial opportunity

• specific prior knowledge guides the cognitive process of interpreting new information

• prior knowledge on markets, customers, and other products influences the individuals discovery of business opportunities

knowledge corridor

people’s prior knowledge determines whether or not and which business opportunity they will identify

experience in markets

• … may be helpful to identify a specific opportunity

• … may lead to being unreceptive for other opportunites

• … may lead to discarding new information, strongly relying in past experiences

entrepreneurs who identify a set of market opportunites prior to first entry…

… derive performance benefits by doing so

the positive relationship between the number of market opportunities identified prior to first entry ...

… and new firm performance is nonlinear and subject to decreasing marginal return

escaping the knowledge corridor

• entrepreneurial experience

• active information search and external knowledge sourcing breadth

• coachability

• creativity techniques

experienced entrepreneurs posses…

… refined and complex (mental) schemata to identify and evaluate business opportunities

lack of entrepreneurial experience can be made up for, by …

… active information search

coachability

degree to which an entrepreneur seeks, carefully considers and integrates feedback

creativity technique analogical reasoning

applying the knowledge from one domain as a kind of model to help in understanding or developing ideas in another domain

creativity technique conceptual combination

mentally combining different, opposing, previously unrelated concepts

creativity techniques

• conceptual combination

• analogical reasoning

• morphological box

creativity technique morphological box

breaking down the problem into its key dimensions

associational thinking

• make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, disciplines, fields or ideas

• cognitive basis of creativity