Abstract:
This thesis presents the findings of a research project which investigates the discovery of opportunities from the perspective of ecopreneurs (ecological entrepreneurs) in New Zealand. Ecopreneurs are becoming increasingly important in sustaining the natural environment but yet little is known about the entrepreneurial processes that drive their businesses or their motivations to start-up their own business. The ecopreneurship literature is an emerging field where research is still in its infancy. The theoretical foundations developed in the mainstream entrepreneurship literature, where the opportunity construct is considered to be central to the entrepreneurial process has largely been ignored in the current ecopreneurial studies thus far. The aims of this research is to contribute to the ecopreneurship literature to provide a better understand of the ecopreneur in the entrepreneurial process and their motivations for startingup their own business. Due to the lack of clarity and empirical research done in this field, an exploratory approach is used. This study adopts a qualitative research method and data analysis that reflects the study’s interpretivist methodology. The findings extracted from the 8 participants are presented thematically. The discussion of the findings suggest that ecopreneurs use their prior entrepreneurial knowledge and knowledge of the natural environments problems to help discover opportunities. Another finding was the ecopreneurs green values which were found to be common a primary driver for starting-up their businesses and highly influenced the opportunity discovery construct. However, due to the exploratory nature of this study, further empirical research is needed to go beyond the scope of this thesis and strengthen these suggestions and findings.
