Nascent entrepreneurial opportunity search: Accidental or purposeful?

Taking a longitudinal approach, I attempted to examine if entrepreneurs actively search, evaluate, and choose the best from among many ideas before starting a venture and if satisficing search behavior will be employed, and what are the determinants of entrepreneurial search. Using data collected from 230 participants who attended entrepreneurship workshops offered by 4 agencies in the midwest metropolitan area in U.S.A, I found that nascent entrepreneurs do seem to actively search for ideas and for business creation information, and that they differ from each other in the process judged by the ideas that they consider. It is also found that entrepreneurial motivation and wealth aspiration determine how entrepreneurs balance the two searching activities- exploration and exploitation. For highly motivated entrepreneurs, the relationship between wealth aspiration and satisficing search is negative while for lowly motivated, the opposite. One other finding of my research is that specific entrepreneurial motivation matters to the opportunity searching behavior, but not the general motivations.