The field of strategic entrepreneurship is a fairly recent one. Its central idea is that
opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking—the former the central subject of the
entrepreneurship field, the latter the central subject of the strategic management field—
are processes that need to be considered jointly. The purpose of this brief chapter is to
explain the emergence of SE theory field in terms of a response to research gaps in the
neighboring fields of entrepreneurship and strategic management; describe the main
tenets of SE theory; discuss its relations to neighboring fields; and finally describe some
research gaps in extant theory, mainly focusing on the need to provide clear microfoundations
for SE theory and link it to organizational design theory.
Research highlights the role of external knowledge sources in the recognition of strategic opportunities, but is less forthcoming with respect to the role of such sources during the process of exploiting or realizing opportunities. We build on the knowledge-based view to propose that realizing opportunities often involves significant interactions with external knowledge sources. Organizational design can facilitate a firm’s interactions with these sources, while achieving coordination among organizational members engaged in opportunity exploitation. Our analysis of a double-respondent survey involving 536 Danish firms shows that the use of external knowledge sources is positively associated with opportunity exploitation, but the strength of this association is significantly influenced by organizational designs that enable the firm to access external knowledge during the process of exploiting opportunities.