Recognizing and exploiting business opportunities is a critical competence for potential, nascent and existing entrepreneurs. From entrepreneurial perspectives, the meaning of the terms ‘ethnicity' and ‘entrepreneurship' have been questioned by many scholars in recent years. Hence, a disagreement over their interpretational meanings and use has arisen. This chapter does not question the validity of this debate, but instead it will explore how ethnicity influences business opportunity formation (BOF) and propose a model of analysis. This will include examining ‘ethnicity' from a three-dimensional point of view based on the works of Aldrich and Waldinger before moving to explore the relationship between ‘ethnicity' and entrepreneurship'. The work is based on primary research undertaken on 4 ethnic groups (Nigeria, Poland, Brazil, and Pakistan) in Ireland and the different approaches that were adopted by the various ethnic groups in setting up, running and managing their businesses in Dublin.
TopResearch on IEs across western societies shows a rapid growth rate in recent times of businesses established by immigrants in their host countries. Thus, the phenomenon of immigrant EOF has become a matter of international interest (Evansluong, 2016). Consequently, understanding how immigrants view and perceive the phenomenon of EOF in practice by using a newly developed Visual Mixed Embeddedness Framework (VMEF) construct (Njoku and Cooney, 2018). Research into entrepreneurship has revealed that IEs have gained significant attention over the past three decades (Vinogradov and Elam, 2010) and a review of the literature highlights that the pursuit of entrepreneurial action requires strong cognitive skills. An IE’s desire to utilize existing enterprise skills to achieve their goals in the host country is understandable given their lack of access to existing jobs due to blocked mobility and frequently this creates a reason to engage in entrepreneurial activities in their host environment (Hastie, 2001). Within this context, ethnic variables (enablers and threats) in the form of cultural factors/components (amongst many others) have been identified as playing an important role in the way that IEs engage in pursuing, running and managing EOF (Halkias and Adendorff, 2016).
The manner through which beliefs influence an entrepreneur’s ability to reduce uncertainties that prevent them from taking action to form opportunities has already been proposed in business models of entrepreneurial activity (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006). According to Ojala (2016, p. 3), the conceptualization of business models comprises of four main components “the product/service, the value network, value delivery and the revenue model”. Furthermore, existing literature emphasises that many business models exist regarding how entrepreneurs form opportunity (Zott et al., 2011) despite the imprecise definitions over business models (Burhart et al., 2011; Zott et al., 2011). According to Osterwalder et al., (2005, p.10), a business model is defined as: “a description of the value a company offers to one or several segments of customers and of the architecture of the firm and its network of partners for creating, marketing and delivering this value and relationship capital, to generate profitable and sustainable revenue streams”. It has been argued that since the propensity to start and run businesses is higher amongst immigrants than natives (Parastudy and Bogenhold, 2019), understanding how they view EOF is paramount since their approach to forming business opportunities differs from the mainstream given how immigrants perceive the phenomenon of the EOF process (Njoku and Cooney, 2018).