Turning entrepreneurship research findings into practical action guidelines: the example of opportunity assessment

It is argued that entrepreneurship researchers do not place sufficient emphasis on making their research findings relevant to entrepreneurs and their advisors. The paper provides a specific example demonstrating five general principles that can be used to turn a complex range of entrepreneurship research findings into useful action guidelines for practicing entrepreneurs. The existing research-based knowledge concerning opportunity assessment is distilled into a diagrammatic framework. This framework and a sequence of ten, plain-English questions, provides entrepreneurs and SME operators with a tool for discovering, evaluating and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities.