Abstract
Extant literature has emphasised the investigation of contemporaneous opportunity emergence. This study explores how nascent entrepreneurs come up with venture ideas and enact them as opportunities. A qualitative live case study was conducted on the ongoing opportunity recognition of graduates with 13 ideas that were supported through business start-up programmes of a UK university-sponsored pre-incubator. By participating the start-up programme, contemporaneous data were collected through semi-structured interview, participants’ mind-mapping, and participant observations during the start-up programme. Inductive thematic analysis reveals a general mechanism of opportunity emergence which shows the process of venture idea conceptualisation to the transformation of opportunity artifact. The process is driven by the socially mediated and moderated interplay between cognition, motivation, and behaviour of nascent entrepreneurs. The key contribution of this study is that it shows the complexity and non-linearity of the opportunity emergence process.