Introduction

In the era of digital economy, IT is becoming the enabler of novel products, services, and business models. Technological advances such as mobile computing, 3D printing, or cloud computing enable the creation of novel opportunities for entrepreneurs. What is particularly important for infusing digital technology into various innovations is the blurring of traditional industry boundaries, the distribution of heterogeneous knowledge, and control (Yoo et al. 2012).

Digital innovation therefore becomes increasingly generative and frequently makes the outcomes of an entrepreneurial effort agnostic as they emerge through a social construction of various actors within innovation networks (Lyytinen et al. 2016).

Therefore, digital technology has inherently changed the nature of entrepreneurial processes and outcomes as the entrepreneurial agency becomes increasingly distributed among a heterogeneous set of actors with diverse goals, motives, and capabilities (Nambisan 2017).

One theoretical perspective on entrepreneurship that aims at explaining both myopic outcomes of entrepreneurial efforts and the distribution of the entrepreneurial agency is the creation view of opportunities (Alvarez and Barney 2007; Alvarez et al. 2013;

Wood and McKinley 2010). This growing body of research

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suggests the iterative social interaction between entrepreneurs and interested stakeholders and the evolutionary nature of opportunities to be idiosyncratic for emergent entrepreneurial opportunities (Garud and Karnøe 2003; Dimov 2010).

Opportunities are thereby not assumed to be objective in the market that can be discovered by entrepreneurs. Rather, they are endogenously created by actions and the enactment of an entrepreneur who seeks to actively exploit opportunities to design new products or services. Thus, they are usually achieved in a multistage, iterative, and interactive process of the entrepreneur with the social environment. Opportunity creation thereby encompasses not only the development of a single product but rather the development of an entire firm (Sarasvathy 2001; Alvarez and Barney 2007; Alvarez et al. 2013).

Following this logic, the opportunity creation process of an entrepreneur has two main idiosyncrasies. First, as opportunities do not exist until they are created by the entrepreneur, the decision-making context is highly uncertain. Neither possible outcomes nor the probability of such are known. Entrepreneurs are therefore not able to predict the outcome of the opportunity creation process as opportunities cannot be fully observed a priori. Rather, the initial opportunity must be enacted in the market and with other stakeholders to observe their reactions (Alvarez and Barney 2007). Second, the beliefs, actions (at the individual level of an entrepreneur), required resources and capabilities (at the firm level of a start-up) are dynamic and

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steadily evolving through social interactions as the entrepreneur tests their thoughts about an opportunity by enacting it with the social environment and receiving feedback and enabling learning (Mukerji and Schudson 1991). Social interactions therefore provide the mutual social development of a viable opportunity idea rather than sourcing novel objective ideas. The consensus building among the entrepreneur and stakeholders, for instance potential customers or investors, iteratively constructs a common understanding of the value of the opportunity (Alvarez et al. 2013).

Although uncertainty about the market demand in entrepreneurial activities and the need for an iterative development of opportunities is a popular theme in practically oriented literature (Ries 2011; Blank 2013), research in the field of entrepreneurship provides little evidence of how to deal with such circumstances. Popular approaches to dealing with such conditions are gathering feedback from peers, family members, or friends or validating one’s idea by consultants (Tocher et al.

2015). However, these approaches also include certain limitations that result from the limited social capital or social competence of entrepreneurs. For instance, limited access to social resources, homogeneity of knowledge among peers, or biased responses might reduce an entrepreneur’s chances of receiving reasonable feedback and persuading a reasonable number of stakeholders of the viability of the opportunity to gain access to further valuable resources that support the entrepreneur in enacting the opportunity (Alvarez et al. 2013). Furthermore,

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the demand-side knowledge of potential customers is frequently not accessible (Nambisan and Zahra 2016).

One possible way to integrate such demand-side knowledge into the development of novel opportunities can be found in the open innovation literature on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing enables socially constructed co-creation by providing scalability, diversity, and flexibility beyond the boundaries of an entrepreneur’s social network (Howe 2008; Leimeister et al.

2009; Schlagwein and Bjørn-Andersen 2014; Blohm et al.

2016). While current literature seems to suggest that crowdsourcing is a powerful tool to search and identify innovative solutions, I argue that crowdsourcing can also be applied to entrepreneurial opportunity creation. Thus, crowdsourcing might serve entrepreneurs in co-creating opportunities with potential market stakeholders and observing how consumers respond to their actions as well as giving them more flexible access to human resources (e.g., crowd work) or financial support (crowdfunding). Given the unique characteristics of opportunity creation as an emergent and uncertain process of iterative development fostered by social interaction and the important role of crowdsourcing in other contexts, I propose the crowd as a suitable mechanism to exchange around boundaries and stimulate the entrepreneurial opportunity creation process across the interface. I argue that the social interaction with a heterogeneous crowd benefits entrepreneurs by providing access to social resources, reducing

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uncertainty about the objective value of an opportunity, and ensuring iterative development, learning, and resource support.

In this paper, I therefore address two key questions associated with the potential role crowdsourcing might play in the entrepreneurial process that goes beyond the development of a single product but rather involves the organization of an entire firm and focuses on the evolutionary process of the iterative development of an initial idea. First, how can the crowd address the requirements and limitations of previous approaches to successful opportunity creation? And, what are the benefits and possible applications of crowdsourcing and thus fields for further research?

The contribution of my work is threefold. First, I contribute to research by explaining how opportunities emerge from interactions between entrepreneurs and their social environment (Alvarez and Barney 2007; Alvarez et al. 2013; Tocher et al.

2015) and on the cognitive perspective of opportunity creation and enactment (Grégoire et al. 2011) by highlighting the role of leveraging external heterogeneous social resources in objectifying and enacting an opportunity. I argue that crowdsourcing supports the entrepreneur in socially constructing and developing their initial idea to successfully create wealth by integrating new resources and fresh perspectives across the interface. Thereby, I extend previous research on the role of social resources by showing the benefits of crowdsourcing during the different phases of the opportunity creation process to

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overcome the limitations of previous research (Tocher et al.

2015). Second, I contribute to the emerging literature stream of digital entrepreneurship (Nambisan 2017) by showing how the affordances of digital infrastructures make the boundaries and agency of entrepreneurial processes less bound. I therefore introduce a new field for entrepreneurship research, which requires further consideration due to its enormous potential:

crowdsourcing for supporting entrepreneurship by expanding the scope of open innovation and crowdsourcing to entrepreneurship research. Thus, I show how entrepreneurs might leverage the crowd to gain access to resources outside the boundaries of their networks and create opportunities by applying digital technology for fluid entrepreneurial processes and agencies (Nambisan 2017). Finally, my research contributes to the literature stream of crowdsourcing by emphasizing the potential role of the crowd in entrepreneurship. I put a constructivism lens on the entrepreneurial process by proposing that crowdsourcing cannot only be the source of creative ideas, as in previous studies, but also serve the purpose of sense making between the entrepreneur and the social environment to further develop and construct opportunities via social interaction.

4.1.2. A Creation Perspective on Entrepreneurship