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Despite intense efforts by development organizations to generate entrepreneurial growth in base-of-the pyramid (BOP) markets over the past several decades, the result has been largely a proliferation of ventures that simply imitate existing business. To achieve a more sustainable and transformative level of development, local entrepreneurs must hone the ability to identify new and more innovative business opportunities. While current theory offers two competing descriptions of how entrepreneurs come to identify new business opportunities – using an ‘ends- focused’ approach vs. a ‘means-focused’ approach – there is no prescription offered as to which would be more likely to lead to the identification of more novel opportunities within impoverished contexts. In an effort to contribute meaningfully to both academic and practical discussions, we employed a quasi-experimental field study involving 147 entrepreneurs in rural Ethiopia. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either an ‘ends-focused’ or ‘means-focused’ 5-hour training session, and subsequently asked to identify as many new business opportunities as possible. Our results suggest that ‘means-focused’ trainings may lead to the identification of more novel business opportunities within impoverished contexts. However, we also find that the extent to which ‘means-focused’ training is more efficacious is dependent on the entrepreneur’s level of exposure to other markets.
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