A PROPOSED INVESTIGATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING PRACTICES BY ENTREPRENEURS

This paper reviews the literature on environmental scanning in new firms. We identify previous relationships between environmental scanning and success and determine any information gaps. Based on these findings, it provides a research design to address these gaps through the development of a questionnaire and hypotheses. Introduction and Research Objective The overall goals of this research are to discover if entrepreneurs change their environmental scanning pattern after startup, and determine if there is a relationship between environmental scanning and success of the business. To accomplish this, we operationalize "success" and environmental scanning. Questions were developed to clarify the scanning activities of the entrepreneurs in pre-startup and post-startup phases. The objective is to better understand the information seeking behavior of entrepreneurs (scanning) and the relationship of that behavior to success. What is environmental scanning? Environmental scanning is a type of information behavior defined as "how people need, seek, manage, give and use information in different contexts" (Savolainen, 2007, p. 112). Environmental scanning is the term given by business people to information seeking about the world in which a business exists. It was initially described by Francis Aguilar in his 1967 book, Scanning the Business Environment, as "the way in which top management gains relevant information about events occurring outside the company in order to guide the company's future course of action" (Aguilar, 1967, p. vii). Another thorough yet succinct definition comes from Kendra S. Albright in a 2004 article: Environmental scanning is the internal communication of external information about issues that may potentially influence an organization's decision-making process. Environmental scanning focuses on the identification of emerging issues, situations, and potential pitfalls that may affect an organization's future (p.40).