How to Avoid Lost Business Opportunities by Developing a Business Mindset in the Front-End of Projects: The Significance of Courage

Focusing on business cases in the context of portfolio management, we investigate how to build a business mindset in the frontend of projects. By applying theory on practical knowledge, in this study, we propose an approach to create business opportunities by developing a business mindset in the front-end of projects. A main research contribution from this work is a grounded theory named Courage, which conceptually describes the significance of acting courageously to build a business mindset in projects’ front-end. This study takes a grounded theory approach involving 92 companies in the upstream oil and gas industry and harnesses two types of data: data collected through 24 interviews with informants and written documents totaling 12,722 pages of text. Our findings show that business mindset demands hands-on experiences, which increases individuals’ ability to read situations and engenders the wisdom needed to make informed decisions, thereby improving individuals’ ability to act in a fashion that creates business opportunities. Our findings also show that personal development with a moral element is crucial for the development of business opportunities.