Emerging Student Entrepreneurship – From Ideas to Opportunities. Comparative Study in France, Germany, and Sweden

This paper is an explorative paper into the phenomena of how an idea about starting a business, in the very beginning of the entrepreneurial venture, develops often into a tentative business idea/model and later a company. This paper therefore models the actual process of further developing a seed business idea to an entrepreneurial opportunity. Following a longitudinal approach that includes standardized questioning surveys, interviews as well as journal notes, we collected data from master students in France, Germany, and Sweden (four in each country). We applied an abductive method with qualitative content analysis to identify and model the first part of the incubation process. The key results reveal that the emerging entrepreneurial process consists of four iterative and mutually interrelated sub processes of discovery, articulation, reflection, and enactment (DARE) that capture the entrepreneurial activities and that are induced by the individual background (including experiences). The paper discusses propositions derived, and provides some directions for future research in the field.