Individual Commitment to Entrepreneurial Opportunities within Firms: Does Intuition – Based Behavior Matter?

The aim of this qualitative study is to identify how the perceptions of the entrepreneur on the nature of the opportunity (objective reality / social construction) and his/her cognitive style (analytical / intuitive) influence the process of commitment to opportunity (analytic process / intuition-based process). Our findings indicate that entrepreneurs with previous opportunity exploitation experience perceive systematically opportunities as social constructions. The individual commitment process to entrepreneurial opportunities perceived as objective realities is analytical, while this process to opportunities perceived as social constructions can be intuition-based, analytical, or mixed. Size and industry seem to have a strong influence on the choice of process type