By definition, entrepreneurship occurs under conditions in which individuals take novel action even when the consequences of such action cannot be known beforehand. There is, then, an inherent “opacity” to business venturing, meaning that the causal linkages and potential outcomes are, for various reasons, a priori unclear or unknown. Historically, scholars have referred to opaque conditions as “uncertain decisional landscapes,” but this blanket association between uncertainty and opacity is problematic since it tells us virtually nothing about the composition, causes, cures, and consequences of opacity. It is also inaccurate since uncertainty is only one of five different knowledge problems that can lead to the emergence and persistence of opacity: the other four being risk, ambiguity, complexity, and equivocality. Despite this centrality of opacity to entrepreneurship research and practice, it remains ill-defined and thinly explicated, which also means that the mitigability of opacity is, at best, a minefield of conceptual guesswork. The purpose of this study is to defuse the minefield and minimize the guesswork by using the special case of entrepreneurship to develop a more intelligible, veridical, and useful way to describe and predict when, how, and why opacity exists and what people do about it.
