Entrepreneurship as a Social Journey of Opportunity Construction: Challenging the Dominating Ways of Understanding Change Processes in the Field of New Venture Creation

This article challenges the traditional ways of explaining the change process of new company formation. Based on an analysis of two well establish and dominating categories of models dealing with the subject in question, being stages inspired models and interactive contingency models, it is argued that these do not accomplish to capture the entrepreneurial start-up process in all its details and dynamics. The models close our eyes towards how the formation process happens rather than create openness, thus leading to static and monotonous explanations of the phenomenon which do not encompass the significance of the creative individuals and their interactions, and thereby do not create a foundation close-to-reality for further development of entrepreneurship. Stages models view on the entrepreneurial change process is in the article associated with a ?Pre-defined Journey?, where as the contingency models view is linked to a ?Semi-structured Journey?. We introduce an alternative complementary perspective, being Symbolic Interactionism, from which the idea of entrepreneurship as a ?Social Journey of Opportunity Construction? arises. This introduction results in the proposal that we as researchers have to step out of predictable comfortable zones and find ourselves in complex risk zones. However, the risky zones also open the space for in-depth understandings of how and why the start-up process emerges and develops.