Innovation contexts and the dynamics of entrepreneurial opportunities

International audienceEntrepreneurial activities are intricately linked to the discovery or creation of opportunities, in the innovation context. Many researches focus on the debate over the nature of opportunities (discovered or created) and more recently on the processes that form entrepreneurial opportunities. However little research investigates the innovation context as one of the attributes that would explain the type and the way opportunities are formed. As the success of entrepreneurial activities also depends on larger socio-cultural contexts, our particular interest in this paper is to explore the influence of specific localised innovation contexts on the opportunity formation process. We look at how an innovation context can become or fail to become an ecosystem forming or enhancing the opportunities (i.e. by providing the relevant technical and market knowledge), resulting in entrepreneurial activities. The study of two specific cases in this paper found two patterns of entrepreneurial process, as the result of two different contexts in which opportunities are in one case discovered or created in the other case