Discovering the collective entrepreneurial opportunities through spatial relationships

Even if in a traditional perspective the discovery and the exploitation of opportunities are associated to the entrepreneur capabilities, a relational perspective is required to better analyze the phenomenon of starting up a new venture. The growing attention to interaction with the external environment has been emerging as a necessary precondition of the entrepreneurial processes as it creates the knowledge and the experience necessary to perceive the opportunity. The entrepreneurial opportunities are created through joint acts with others through social relationships. Shifting the attention from social to business relationships, the main aim of this paper is to investigate the discovery and the exploitation of collective entrepreneurial opportunities in starting up new business. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of relational proximity in this entrepreneurial journey considered as an emergent process of transforming potentiality into actuality