Digital Business Platforms and the Discovery of Entrepreneurial Opportunities, case Study of three Moroccan Startups

Résumé

Entrepreneurship through the platform strategy has gained increasing research attention in recent years. To date, research has not adequately explained how entrepreneurs discover opportunities related to the development of digital business platforms (DBPs), which creates a gap in the entrepreneurship literature. Through in-depth case studies of three digital business platforms, I show that entrepreneurs discover opportunities related to the information that they already possess, the interaction with the market and with their social network. I use these findings to draw several implications, including: (1) entrepreneur’s prior knowledge about how to serve markets influences their discovery of how to use DBPs to serve a market; (2) entrepreneurial alertness is an important antecedent of DBPs development; (3) Weak ties are more important than strong ties in developing a strong network effect that leads to a Successful DBP. Overall, we conclude that, unlike offline entrepreneurship, opportunities are not obvious for anyone, that is to say, entrepreneurs need a combination of prior knowledge, entrepreneurial alertness and social network to recognize and develop a DBP that meets the target customers needs.