Which statement best differentiates opportunity-driven entrepreneurship from resource-driven entrepreneurship?

• A. Opportunity-driven entrepreneurship begins with a set of available assets and searches for a market.
• B. Resource-driven entrepreneurship focuses on creating a new market opportunity.
• C. Opportunity-driven entrepreneurship seeks to exploit a market opportunity with an innovative offering; resource-driven starts from existing resources and constraints, building a venture around them.
• D. Both approaches start with a clean slate and have no constraints.

Answer: (C)

Two different ways to approach starting a venture: some entrepreneurs begin by spotting a market need and then design an offering to fulfill that need, often with some innovative twist. Others start from what they already have—existing resources, assets, and constraints—and build the venture around those realities, using bootstrapping and creative reconfigurations.

The best choice captures this contrast by saying that opportunity-driven entrepreneurship seeks to exploit a market opportunity with an innovative offering. It emphasizes starting with a demand or gap in the market and delivering a novel solution to capture it, which aligns with pursuing growth and market impact.

In contrast, starting from existing resources and constraints and building the venture around them—leveraging what’s at hand rather than chasing a new market escape route—defines the resource-driven approach. It focuses on what can be done with the current setup rather than what the market might require.

The other options don’t fit as well: starting with assets and searching for a market reverses the typical order; claiming resource-driven focuses on creating a new market opportunity misstates the inward, constraint-based starting point; and suggesting no constraints ignores the fundamental role constraints play in the resource-driven mindset.