A new perspective on entrepreneurial trait analysis: adding non-linear views to traditional perceptions

The field of entrepreneurship is sometimes divided into two communities of interests. One group of entrepreneurship researchers focuses on the external forces and investigates the situations in which entrepreneurial opportunity is recognised and exploited, while the other is interested in the individuals involved and views entrepreneurship as a function of core human attributes (Campbell, 2003; Burnett and McMurray, 2004). Both communities of interest seek to explain a wide range of complex entrepreneurial activities. Proponents of the first school argue that entrepreneurial actions are episodic with little evidence of permanence, and hence concentrate on external forces. The second school counters that every external force requires the action of those individuals who identify and pursue opportunities. This last notion finds resonance with authors like Bygrave (1989a and 1989b), Bygrave and Hofer (1991), Gartner (2001), and Mitton (1989). Bygrave and Hofer (1991:14) define an entrepreneur as 'someone who perceives an opportunity and creates an organization to pursue it', adhering to the notion that the creation of a business is driven by an individual who has the skills to both recognise business opportunities and being able to build a business around these. Some ten years later, Shane and Venkataraman (2000), similarly maintain that: 'entrepreneurship involves the nexus of two phenomena: the presence of lucrative opportunities and the presence of enterprising individuals' (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000:218). Shane (2003) takes this further by integrating both views, offering an overarching conceptual framework consisting of different components of the entrepreneurial process together with the characteristics of entrepreneurial opportunities and the individuals who discover, pursue and exploit them. These incorporate the skills and strategies necessary to do so. This paper leverages on this overarching framework, by linking the entrepreneur's behaviour with the situations occurring during the process of new venture growth. This is accomplished by investigating entrepreneurial characteristics from a broader (non-linear) perspective. The focus thus turns to the interactions between the entrepreneur and the opportunity and to defining more comprehensive non-linear traits that will better typify the successful creation of new ventures.