This paper focuses on entrepreneurial opportunities in a consumer market setting. The purpose is to explore how the corporate branding process influences emerging entrepreneurial opportunities. The empirical results show the importance of symbols and images influencing emerging opportunities, rather than isolated product innovations. Here the importance of examining all the people involved in the entrepreneurial process, rather than just focusing on the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial organization, is emphasized. The case illustrates the intensity and the devotion invested in the creation of a context that holds the Nav products. In this process the interplay between identity and image is described in a corporate branding perspective. I show how, by whom, and where, the creation of context becomes distinct. Introducing the creation of context to entrepreneurship theories change the opportunity discussion from a situation where organizational aspects are primarily focused on, to a situation also emphasizing the consumer market side of entrepreneurial opportunities. The theoretical results illustrate how branding theory and marketing/entrepreneurship interface theories shift the interest from organization aspects to market related aspects of the entrepreneurial process. The overall conclusions are that branding aspects of the entrepreneurial process are becoming more challenging in a society and on a market generally characterized by fragmentation.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to critically investigate the use of metaphor in the entrepreneurial process. In particular, the paper focuses on how metaphors are used in the construction of the environment, a precondition for the creation of business opportunities. Design/methodology/approach - This paper reports on a two-day meeting between Light, a management consultancy firm, and Epsilon one of their clients. The data are drawn from a larger ethnographic study within Light. The consultants and their clients are followed in their daily work. The focus was on how metaphor use influenced their organisational practices. Findings - Investigating the play of metaphors in Epsilon, it is shown how the firm's environment is created; a pre-condition for understanding how entrepreneurial opportunities are created. It is shown how use of metaphor, understood as a mode of interpretation, is taking place over time, and how it is part of a relational, context-dependent process. Research limitations/ implications - The present study provides new ways of understanding the use of metaphor in the entrepreneurial process. It also indicates the need for a continued focus on language use in the entrepreneurial process. One limitation is that not all aspects of metaphor use are investigated. Practical implications - This research can help to influence practitioners to pay more attention to the use of metaphors, not only as a tool for creative thinking or the questioning of embedded assumptions, but also as a mode for interpreting, structuring and producing images of the environment and the organisation. Originality/value - This paper contributes to development of influences from the linguistic turn to entrepreneurship studies by exploring metaphor theory. One result of this focus on language is an increased sensitivity to metaphor use in the entrepreneurial process.

he purpose of this article is to examine how returning entrepreneurs and local stakeholders are involved in co-producing an entrepreneurial region. A theoretical framework is proposed based on two metaphors: embeddedness and translation. Moreover, the value of the framework is illustrated by a case drawn from a study conducted over a 3-year period. The work is based on a constructionist approach, and the results emerged from a narrative analysis. Our partial ethnographic methodology gives us the opportunity to follow the interaction between entrepreneurs and local stakeholders over time. The findings show that what needs to become embedded to attain regional development is an entrepreneurial attitude to life in the region, not only the embeddedness of the returning entrepreneurs and their firms. Consequently, the framework results in a perspective emphasizing the interplay over time between entrepreneurs and local stakeholders. The value of the article is that it shows how the co-production of the entrepreneurial region between entrepreneurs and local stakeholders results in a continued regional development.

Many studies have been conducted on strategic alliances, but mainly from large and medium-sized companies’ perspectives. This work concentrates on small firms and suggests a typology of small firm alliances to reveal their opportunities and constraints relating to alliance formation and development. By combining network and Entrepreneurship orientation (EO), an alliance typology consisting of four categories: (1) stable-proactive, (2) stable-innovative, (3) dynamic-proactive and (4) dynamic-innovative is developed. The proposed typology is exemplified by the help of in-depth case illustration which performs a two-fold function: it examines the applicability of the typology and it offers guidance to the entrepreneurs as how to combine effectively network and EO and also position the firm in the appropriate typology in managing business. All the alliance type can be appropriate for small firms, but the nature of business will decide which type will be employed. One limitation of this study is the focus on service firms. Two studies can be suggested in this regard: a focus exclusively on the manufacturing firms to compare with the result of the current study and to combine both service and manufacturing firms to illustrate the theoretical contribution.