Lessons from Iago: Narrating the event of Entrepreneurship

Abstract

To be able to demonstrate as well as argue for the possibilities of a narrative approach in entrepreneurship studies, this article focuses on some resonance between a story - the 'Toy Story' of Terry Allen's, the Marvel Mustang story - and a passage from Shakespeare's Othello, with particular focus on the character of Iago. I argue that a narrative approach enables us to learn from the ways of Iago when analysing the 'Toy Story'. In particular, we learn that we need to broaden the more conventional focus on opportunity recognition/evaluation/exploitation (and the resource based view) to include the time of opportunity creation. The article demonstrates how this can be done and discusses some consequences for entrepreneurship research. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.