Entrepreneurial opportunities as expressions of personal identities: interpretative engagement through personal value structures

Entrepreneurial identities have a significant influence on new venture emergence. Yet, an entrepreneur’s (meaning-constructing) interpretive engagement with situations such as entrepreneurial opportunities remain relatively unexplained. This paper explores how entrepreneurs’ personal identities influence their interpretive engagement with entrepreneurial opportunities. We presented 34 entrepreneurs with three business scenarios and, using verbal protocols and content analysis techniques, inductively identified seven individual value types. We find that these value types vary among individual founders, revealing distinct personal identities (as personal value structures). These types are reflections of exogenously and endogenously oriented personal identities that depict how individuals perceive scenarios as situations that represent the environment as exogenous (scenarios as what is) or as endogenously constructed (scenarios as what could be). Therefore, we contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by highlighting the significance of personal identities as representations of entrepreneurial goals that give rise to different framings of situations as entrepreneurial opportunities as these become expressions of their personal identities.