Abstract
Drawing on the entrepreneurship and strategy literature, this paper develops an alternative framework for analyzing strategic entrepreneurship process. Three dimensions are emphasized: opportunity identification, resource exploitation and asset accumulation. The paper argues strategic entrepreneurship as a cumulative, evolutionary process begins with opportunity identification which involves environment scanning and industry awareness. Opportunity identification follows by resource exploitation and, under conditions of the liabilities of smallness and newness, entrepreneurs usually mobilize external context of resources to capitalize on potentially technological and commercial opportunities. This entrepreneurial behavior is path dependent, implying that entrepreneurship is shaped by organizational asset and capability that are evolved and accumulative over time. With the proposal framework in hand, the paper adopts a comparative case study methodology to analyze the strategic entrepreneurship process in four Taiwanese firms – Acer, Mitac, UMC and TSMC. This paper concludes by discussing implications for theory, practice and future research.