At the initial conception, an entrepreneur needs a market opportunity, the ability to access the required resources such as human capital, technology and finance and some luck against competitors.
During their development, the entrepreneur needs to develop their business by interactively testing and improving their concept and be highly responsive to market signals to access a gap in the ‘market’, all while seeking the resources its needs for its growth and to ‘cross the chasm’ into an established entity.
During the maturity phase, an entrepreneur embeds the business more strongly in its environment, creating its own space, able to draw upon its own well-established source of resources. All the while, the entrepreneur pollinates and germinates its contacts and networks to become more resilient to new threats or competitors.