Entrepreneurship, Knowledge, Space, and Place: Evolutionary Economic Geography meets Austrian Economics

In a society with dispersed knowledge, entrepreneurs have to identify opportunities, recognize them as relevant, and match them with (demand) preferences, technological feasibilities, and their own skills. According to Austrian theory, this is done on a subjective basis: different people not only have different preferences but also different perceptions, interpretations, and understandings of values and feasibilities, which they adapt in mutual interaction and communication in specific contexts over their unique life courses (Nooteboom, 2000). Different minds think different things (Lachmann, 1978), and the entrepreneurial opportunities people perceive very much depend on their prior knowledge (Shane, 2000).