Chapter 5: Bisociation and Opportunity
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Published:2000
Stephen Ko, 2000. "Bisociation and Opportunity", Opportunity Identification and Entrepreneurial Behavior, John E. Butler
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Abstract
Building on the current state of the literature on the variables that have been used to predict entrepreneurial opportunity identification, this study attempts to reorganize alertness, social networks, and prior knowledge into an interrelated context, and most importantly, specify the role of an individual’s bisociative mode of thought in a proposed entrepreneurial opportunity identification framework. The inclusion of bisociation into the framework provides valuable insights into the process of identifying entrepreneurial opportunities because it is considered an important element in the formation of novel entrepreneurial ideas, which lead to opportunities. All this seeks to advance theoretical development in the area of opportunity identification, and has implications for future research.
The nineteenth century was the age of the most spectacular syntheses in the history of thought—of royal marriages between previously unrelated and often hostile dynasties. The science of electricity merged with that of magnetism. Then electro-magneticradiations were discovered to account for light, color, radiant hear, Hertzian waves.Chemistry was swallowed up by atomic physics. The control of the body by nervesand glands was seen to rely on electro-chemical processes. The previously independent effluvia or powers of nature which had been known as heat, light, electric fire,mechanical motion, magnetic flux were recognized to be all convertible one into another, and to be merely different forms of energy, whose total amount contained in the universe always remained the same.
—Koestler (1964, p. 228)
