Productive opportunities, uncertainty, and science-based firm emergence

We provide greater theoretical precision to the concept of productive opportunities of Penrose. We show firm emergence as a recursive cycle of changing productive opportunities. We show how those opportunities result from the technological base of the firm and are associated with the particular characteristics of the technology.

We also show how productive opportunities require the assembly of different internal and external resources, and therefore partners. We address explicitly how the firm and its potential partners perceive uncertainty and single out the different mechanisms used by the firm to address uncertainty—envisioning, pooling, and staging—to secure resources from external partners and exploit the identified productive opportunities in a timely manner.