Operational Entrepreneurship: How Operations Management Research Can Advance Entrepreneurship

In this article, we introduce the notion of operational entrepreneurship–the selection and management of transformation processes for recognizing, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities for potential value creation–to offer examples of research opportunities at the interface of entrepreneurship and operations management. Specifically, we believe that operations management has been under‐utilized for gaining a deeper understanding of (i) the knowledge and motivation required for opportunity recognition, (ii) evaluations of a recognized opportunity to determine if it represents an opportunity for the specific entrepreneur, and (iii) the role that feedback from an exploitation of a current opportunity plays in the recognition and evaluation of subsequent opportunities. We also introduce (but not develop) the notion of entrepreneurial operations.