Measuring the market newness of new ventures

The present lack of instruments for measuring entrepreneurial opportunity is hampering progress in entrepreneurship research and fundamental hypotheses about opportunity variance are not being tested. This paper sets out to validate a measure of market newness in new ventures based in Austrian Economics, assuming a view of opportunity as objective and discoverable. Empirically, a sample of 250 new internal ventures in gestation was examined regarding to whom these ventures presented something new in terms of geographical extension or new customer groups. The measure improves on existing instruments by providing more intrinsic range while being firmly anchored in an Austrian Economics framework.

Research Highlights
► Measurements of opportunity variance are still largely missing in the literature.
► We use Austrian Economics to develop a scale to measure the newness of new ventures.
► The measurement scale is tested on a multi-wave sample of 250 new internal ventures.
► The scale showed an adequate internal consistency as well as criterion validity.