The actualization approach: Moving the entrepreneurship field forward

How do entrepreneurs make sense of opportunities and what constrains their sense-making process? To address this, we refine the actualization approach, that claims to dovetail the discovery and creation approaches without any systematic explanation. By proposing the dichotomous nature of opportunities as dependent on profit or loss, and merely a cognitive activity, the actualization approach undervalues the possible role of entrepreneurs’ non-economic objectives and their behavioural inclinations. Additionally, the actualization approach asserts that entrepreneurs will be able to recognise opportunities only in the future after making a profit. This assumption of the actualization approach ignores the reality that entrepreneurs’ efforts are more comprehensive than this and suggests that entrepreneurs always develop a conjecture for opportunities or that they should rely on luck. Therefore, by employing Chater and Lowenstein’s sense-making model we explore what drives entrepreneurs to gather, attend to, and process information in a cognitively constrained and behaviourally deliberated fashion. This study concludes by offering implications for future research, including how and when entrepreneurs’ unrealistic presuppositions could be detrimental to their sense-making process.