ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurs have to obtain resources from external actors through networking to ensure the sustained competitive advantage of their firms. These resources constitute an entrepreneur’s social capital. A major issue in entrepreneurship research generally concerns the mechanisms through which entrepreneurs’ networks and relationships develop and help create social capital (Gedajlovic et al., 2013). Entrepreneurs may develop networks that involve repeated interactions, creating strong ties and bonding social capital, or occasional interactions with less familiar actors, creating weak ties and bridging social capital (Adler and Kwon, 2002). While the former may be helpful to entrepreneurs initially, they can lead to rigidity in the identification and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. The latter can help entrepreneurs to make new connections that open up the identification and exploitation of new opportunities. Of particular concern here are the potential differences between the networks of habitual entrepreneurs and novice entrepreneurs with no PBOE to mobilize. While habitual entrepreneurs may have developed the ability to build stronger and more effective networks than novice entrepreneurs (Wiklund and Shepherd, 2008), there is limited analysis of how this process occurs, and of the variety in the elements of these networks.
