Title: Interpretation of the nexus between the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial business opportunities in the healthcare context: a phenomenological study

Authors: Rosa Mehrabi; Jahangir Yadollahi Farsi; Kambiz Talebi

Addresses: Faculty of Entrepreneurship, University of Tehran, 16 St., North Kargar Ave., Tehran, Iran ' Faculty of Entrepreneurship, University of Tehran, 16 St., North Kargar Ave., Tehran, Iran ' Faculty of Entrepreneurship, University of Tehran, 16 St., North Kargar Ave., Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Since few studies focused exclusively on the entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial agents and their interaction with the business opportunities in the healthcare area, the purpose of this paper is to interpret the intersubjective nature of the interplay between the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial business opportunities in the context of healthcare entrepreneurship. The paper's methodology is qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology. The samples of sixteen entrepreneurs in the pharmaceutical, medical biotechnology, medical devices and m-health areas of Iran were interviewed using semi-structured questions. Based on the interpretive phenomenological analysis approach, this study explores how healthcare entrepreneurs make sense of their business opportunities. The findings indicated seven spheres of the entrepreneurs' context-based insights, the entrepreneurs' context-based projections, the entrepreneurs' dispositional attributions, the external facilities in macro levels, the external facilities in micro levels, the entrepreneur's environmentally oriented actions and the entrepreneur's presupposition-oriented actions as the nature of the entrepreneurship nexus.

Keywords: entrepreneur; entrepreneurial opportunity; entrepreneurship nexus; healthcare entrepreneurship; context; hermeneutic phenomenology; interpretation; entrepreneurship; small business.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2019.101107

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2019 Vol.37 No.3, pp.415 - 433

Received: 11 Sep 2017
Accepted: 15 Sep 2017
Published online: 24 Jul 2019 *

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