Challenges Faced by Opportunity Entrepreneurs, The Case of Syrian Refugees in Sweden

Abstract: The recent immigration crisis is a topic of interest for many researchers nowadays. Although refugees represent the biggest number of immigrants in Europe, researchers tend to comprehensively tackle immigrant entrepreneurship and neglect refugees' distinctiveness. This qualitative study explores the phenomenon of refugee entrepreneurship and its common challenges based on multiple case studies of Syrian refugees in Sweden. Unlike the consensus view that associate refugees with necessity entrepreneurship, the authors of this paper study refugees in the context of opportunity entrepreneurship. In other words, refugees who became self-employed as an option for vocational activity were not considered but rather refugees who have been pulled into entrepreneurship out of their personal intention regardless of other potential job alternatives. Seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with refugee entrepreneurs who moved to Sweden during the immigration wave to Europe in 2015. The identified challenges include the following factors: Information acquisition and accessibility, network, socio-cultural, family, bureaucratic system, and financials. The outcome of the research realizes the surrounding circumstances of self-employed refugees and spot differences in how opportunity entrepreneurs perceive the challenges in comparison with necessity entrepreneurs. The purpose of the study contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how the entrepreneurial environment could be improved in order to boost refugees' entrepreneurial intentions and activities. Overall, the ambition and growth intention of opportunity refugee entrepreneurs pose different challenges and require considerable additional efforts than other immigrant entrepreneurs. Operating on a higher level comes with a price—however, the study requests for policies to be directed towards the development of opportunity entrepreneurship.