Abstract
Entrepreneurial opportunity is the key construct of the entrepreneurial process. The recent debate on the opportunity wars shows that the construct lacks consensual clarity – scholars divided their opinion on the role of external environments and the role of entrepreneurs. By adopting design entrepreneurship, this study aims to understand how nascent entrepreneurs refine and shape their venture ideas into opportunity artifacts in the context of an early-phase organisation support system (known as a pre-incubator). A qualitative case study was conducted on a UK university pre-incubator that supported 13 venture ideas through its business start-up programme. The finding reveals nascent entrepreneurs, with the support of pre-incubator managers, applied a distinct design process that portrays the transformation of venture ideas from abstract artifacts to material artifacts to narrative artifacts.