Immigrant Student Entrepreneurs’ Perceptions of Capabilities Needed to Overcome Barriers and Rapidly Pursue Foreign Market Opportunities

Businesses with owners from ethnic minorities function differently. Ethnocultural differences shape business decision-making and are impacted by discriminatory practices across the marketplace. While research has centered on the way ethnicity shapes business development and on the impact barriers have on commercial practices within ethnic minority populations, this chapter provides an instrumental case study of 20 immigrant student entrepreneurs at a Canadian university, investigating their perceptions of the capabilities needed to overcome barriers and rapidly pursue foreign market opportunities. It builds on a body of knowledge that features immigrant entrepreneurs’ ability to overcome barriers and identify and exploit opportunities. This chapter focuses on the experiences of immigrant student entrepreneurs in Canada and observes that this population of ethnic minority business owners possess certain generic, and unique capabilities that are further developed from within the university space in order to allow this population of entrepreneurs to overcome barriers and excel in the marketplace. These observations help transform how we understand ethnic minority entrepreneurship and offer important recommendations to facilitate effective support mechanisms to develop this potential beyond this university-centered instrumental case study.