A General Theory of Entrepreneurship: The Individual-Opportunity Nexus

In the first exhaustive treatment of the field in 20 years, Scott Shane extends the analysis of entrepreneurship by offering an overarching conceptual framework that explains the different parts of the entrepreneurial process - the opportunities, the people who pursue them, the skills and strategies used to organize and exploit opportunities, and the environmental conditions favorable to them - in a coherent way. Given the level of interest devoted to entrepreneurship in the economy and among academics at business schools, one would think that researchers would have deep insights into this phenomenon. However, those who look closely at academic investigations of entrepreneurship realize that scholarly…