In user's shoes: An experimental design on the role of perspective taking in discovering entrepreneurial opportunities

•We untangle cognitive processes of user perspective taking (PT) in entrepreneurship.•We set up one experimental study.•User PT enhances an entrepreneur's ability to recognize market opportunities.•It also helps provide solutions more aligned to the targeted customer's needs.•Prior knowledge moderates the relation between user PT and opportunity recognition.

In this paper we investigate how the entrepreneur's ability of taking the perspective of the user in a market enhances opportunity identification. We also show how prior knowledge of the market positively moderates the relationship between user perspective taking and opportunity recognition. Our study is grounded in entrepreneurship contributions that try to disentangle the role of cognitive processes in opportunity recognition. We confirm our intuition through a one-factorial between-subject experiment and we discuss our findings for entrepreneurship research and user innovation literatures.