Opportunity Evaluation through Social Interactions and Entrepreneurial Micro-action

Opportunity evaluation despite being an essential phase of entrepreneurial process has not been examined in a social context. In this paper, we study how entrepreneurs evaluate the new venture idea in a social setting in an academic-incubator setting. We find venture ideas to be transitioning in different idea states during the evaluation phase. Further, the entrepreneurs engage with various communities of stakeholder and exhibit two broad approaches to evaluation - sequential and concurrent. While the sequential approach seems to rely on meaning-giving, the concurrent approach uses meaning-receiving as means to evaluate the venture idea.