Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Development

Market Intelligence Generation, Social Capital and Firm Creation: A Focus on Nascent Entrepreneurs
Edwin Knox, Chinyere Emmanuel Egbe

Abstract
Prior research on entrepreneurship has identified social, demographic and economic variables that contribute to an individual propensity to engage in entrepreneurial activities. These efforts led to the need for a comprehensive understanding of the firm creation process beyond socio-economic and demographic variables. Consistent with that recommendation, marketing is one area that has been argued to offer additional insight into entrepreneurship and more specifically the firm creation process. This paper proposes to study the relationship between Market Orientation (MO) and Entrepreneurial Firm Creation (FC) of Nascent Entrepreneurs. Extant research on Market Orientation (MO) and its use by Nascent Entrepreneurs (NE) have largely focused on managers in existing firms and individuals who are employees of other businesses. This paper focuses on the individual who takes that fateful step to create a firm and will seek to (a) determine whether individual nascent entrepreneurs who engage in market intelligence gathering are more likely to complete the firm creation process by starting a business, (b) assess the role of social capital in the relationship between market intelligence gathering and firm creation. This will add to the understanding of why some nascent entrepreneurs succeed at creating new firms and others do not.

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