Determinants of Entrepreneurial Opportunity Formation in Tunisia: A Comparative Analysis of Discovery and Creation Logics

Haithem Chaabouni

Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in fostering economic development and strengthening national resilience. Consequently, scholars, educational institutions, and research organizations have increasingly focused on understanding how entrepreneurial opportunities emerge. This study investigates entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and creation in Tunisia, a country that has experienced significant political and economic instability since 2011. Drawing on two complementary theoretical perspectives the causation logic of opportunity discovery and the effectuation logic of opportunity creation we examine ten factors that may influence the emergence of entrepreneurial opportunities. The study is based on interviews with 53 Tunisian entrepreneurs who have launched their own ventures. To provide a comprehensive analysis, we adopt a mixed-methods approach combining configurational analysis, multiple regression, and artificial neural networks to identify the most influential relationships. The effectuation-based model explains 73.7% of the variance in entrepreneurial opportunity creation, whereas the causation-based model accounts for 51%. These findings suggest that entrepreneurial action, experimentation, and resource recombination play a more significant role than opportunity discovery alone. The results further indicate that risk perception and fear do not significantly enhance opportunity recognition, whereas uncertainty, social networks, and the accumulation of information stimulate the generation of new entrepreneurial ideas. Contrary to findings reported in much of the existing literature, strategic planning appears to contribute less to entrepreneurial opportunity development in the Tunisian context; instead, excessive planning tends to delay entrepreneurial action rather than facilitate it.