Opportunity Recognition in High Tech and Regulatory Environment: A Study of Product Based Indian Telecom Start-Ups

Opportunity recognition forms the first step of entrepreneurship. Off late entrepreneurship research has looked at opportunity recognition from varied lenses with entrepreneurial learning forming the core of most scholarly work. However opportunity recognition in high tech sectors is slightly different due to a high component of knowledge intensiveness inherent in such sectors and has been largely ignored in most work. So, we explore a specific high tech sector in the paper to understand and further the existing concepts within opportunity recognition process. We choose the Indian telecom sector as the context of the study and using an inductive case based approach arrive at conceptual combination as the dominant form of idea generation. The regulatory environment was found to acts as an enabler for the new ideas to flourish. We also bring in the idea of dynamic customization as the driving force behind the venture akin to symbiotic relationship present between organisms in the nature.