What are the Entrepreneurship Opportunities in Electronic Business? (Case study from a Developing Country)

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify entrepreneurship opportunities in the field of electronic business in Zahedan, Iran. The present research is based on the mixed-method approach using a sequential exploratory design. The statistical population includes managers of related companies in the Science and Technology Park in Zahedan, Iran. The researchers employed unstructured interviews with 14 managers for the sampling purposes in the qualitative phase. After coding the data, respective electronic business opportunities were identified in different dimensions and questionnaire items were extracted accordingly. Then, the questionnaire was distributed among the managers of all working companies. In the qualitative phase, 29 items were identified and were classified into five areas of electronic tourism, electronic transportation, electronic content production, electronic services, and electronic commerce. The results showed that all the identified items were statistically significant except for the two components of virtual tour in electronic tourism and electronic toll payment in electronic transportation. Moreover, the findings showed that electronic transportation was regarded as the first priority opportunity, followed by producing electronic content and electronic commerce while electronic services were reported as having the least priority.