Business design or Creative design: towards a unifying framework on design within the context of entrepreneurship in creative industries

Business design is about turning good ideas into future business, but it requires a great entrepreneurial opportunity to be exploited via a valid strategic and organizational design. The literature says much about how entrepreneurs design strategies and organizations, but how do they design an opportunity? So far, the literature has highly relied on the concept of alertness, which implies to notice without deliberate creation of opportunities. Theories seldom describe how entrepreneurial opportunities purposely come into existence - the concept of "opportunity design" is a black box. The paper is a rudimentary effort to fill this box. Since opportunity design is a creative process, ideas from the creative design industries and literature are brought in to suggest a framework to explain how opportunities intentionally and pro-actively can be designed. This framework is indeed valuable to support aspirating entrepreneurs. An illustrative case provides an empirical example of the soundness of the framework.