Individual-Level Predictors of Entrepreneurial Opportunity Identification: A Review and a Meta-Analytical Examination

Identifying opportunities is the initial step in the entrepreneurship process. A great deal of work has been devoted to investigating this concept in previous research. However, even a brief foray into this stream of research highlights the inconsistencies in findings when considering different studies that have investigated the antecedents of opportunity identification. These divergent findings are especially significant when considering individual level predictors of opportunity identification. Social networks, prior knowledge, and personal characteristics are three main categories of predictors that have been widely studied at this level. Our study uses the meta-analysis approach to first identify and categorize the main individual level antecedents of opportunity identification and second to account for some of the factors that cause variation on the impact of these factors on opportunity identification.