The Innovative Opportunities and Technical Arbitrage Opportunities Index Using Data Envelopment Analysis

Despite the impressive development of theories in entrepreneurship, without the development of measurement theories, further advancement of the field is problematic. In particular, the notion of opportunities, central to entrepreneurship research, requires adequate macro-level quantitative measurements. In this paper we demonstrate how to employ data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate not only innovative opportunities, but also technological arbitrage opportunities. We provide an illustrative example based on a sample of 96 countries during the period of 1995–2012. We include estimates of innovative and technical arbitrage opportunities for possible use by other scholars, demonstrate how both innovative and technical arbitrage opportunities correlate with the rates of New Business Density. Then, the countries of the world in terms of indicators of innovative and technical arbitrage opportunities classified into four groups. Finally, comparison between oil-exporting and non-oil exporting countries shows that relatively oil-exporting countries (including Iran) are less among the countries that have high innovation opportunities utilization index, and are with a large proportion among the countries that do not exploit technical arbitrage opportunities.