Opportunity, necessity and entrepreneurial success: a farming perspective

Although there is a diversity of motivations associated with the start-up of new businesses, there has been a trend recently to reduce them to two types, 'necessity' and 'opportunity'. Necessity entrepreneurship is particularly associated with developing countries, where poverty is prevalent whilst opportunity is more associated with developed countries, where basic needs are met and more choice is available (Acs et al. 2005). Such reduction, however, can be criticised. It overlooks the complexity of 'push' and 'pull' factors in business start-ups; in particular many entrepreneurs may be motivated by both necessity and opportunity, and both may be relevant if a successful new business is to emerge. There is also a temporal dimension whereby the business environment, and perceived solutions to its challenges may change over time. Hitherto there has been little research, either on developing or developed countries, on how necessity and opportunity combine during the entrepreneurial process to achieve a successful start-up. To explore this issue research was conducted in both a developed and developing country context. Firstly, 26 case studies were conducted among Scottish farmers in order to gain insights into to the entrepreneurial processes adopted by them and the motivation behind such processes. Secondly, findings were compared and contrasted with those of case studies which had been already carried out in Sri Lanka on rural villagers, all of whom were poor and in an apparent state of poverty and necessity. These studies, though located in countries so different in terms of economic development, were set in more or less similar contexts. Both being rural environments which are highly constrained and the units of analysis being the farmer/farming households. The findings revealed that, though necessity and opportunity can both trigger the start-up of businesses, it is the opportunity driven nature of the farmers which enabled them to grow and sustain their businesses. The Sri Lankan farmers could be categorised into a majority of mono-active (the most necessitous) and a minority of pluriactive farmers who were portfolio entrepreneurs. Income generation resulted from numerous activities including the diversification of their own family labour.