Abstract
Entrepreneurs form new ventures guided by their vision and the formation of a clear opportunity to make it a reality. Their probability of successfully going from an idea to business is heavily dependent on the effective utilization of their knowledge and the creative implementation of resources available in the environment. At the early stage of any startup company and during its development, founders actuate the formation of opportunities through the processes of exploration for discovery and exploration for creation. Very often, the actions and decisions taken by these founders exhibit patterns already described in theories of entrepreneurship and innovation. Likewise, many of the indications prescribed in multiple frameworks that fundament these theories are followed consciously or unconsciously by entrepreneurs during the exploration of opportunities to attain innovation. We conducted an exploratory research of current literature corresponding to the topics of opportunity formation and the process of exploration for innovation. This thesis takes into account such research for studying how events related to the formation of opportunities can be identified by looking through the theoretical lenses of three different theories of innovation and entrepreneurship: Jobs To Be Done, Entrepreneurial Bricolage and Networking theory. An analytical framework was developed based on these theories and was used for examining the primary data collected from conducting semi structured interviews with the founders of 11 Norwegian tech startup companies. The exploration process is subdivided in the stages of ideation, iteration of prototypes and initial validation given by consumers or investors that supported the product or service, allowing the company to grow beyond startup phase. The results obtained from analysing the exploration process that each founder underwent are presented in transcripts, tables of coding, and timelines. Through the discussion of the results we found that events related to the formation of opportunities can be effectively identified throughout the exploration process using elements extracted from theories of entrepreneurship and innovation. The findings of our inductive reasoning are encapsulated in a model for innovation management in startup companies that can be used by researchers to examine exploration practices for either the creation or discovery of opportunities. This can also be considered when examining conditions imposed by resource-constrained environments in which new companies are usually born.