Entrepreneurial Ideas & Opportunities

Entrepreneurial Ideas & Opportunities : Recognizing Opportunities & Generating Ideas:

Entrepreneurial Ideas & Opportunities are very important for all new businesses. Recognizing opportunities & generating ideas for new businesses and entrepreneurs is the 1st task in the 2nd step of entrepreneurship. Ideas are simply thoughts that the entrepreneur thinks about, with the belief that they can make out good businesses depending primarily on their own preferences. On the other hand, opportunity means looking through the eyes of the market and customers. It’s a favorable set of circumstances that creates the need for a new product or service that provides real value for the customer and solves an existing problem whose solution is not available. This discussion is provided to you on your channel (Management with Merits – Manage to Prosper) as part of explaining the 2nd book in the channel (Entrepreneurship 2012). We have actually started discussing the book in the post preceding this one when we highlighted the first step in the entrepreneurial process (Deciding to Become an Entrepreneur, part 1 – chapter 1 of the book). In addition, the book has been introduced in a previous video. Besides, last session we invited a Yemeni female entrepreneur (Miss Hawazen) to provide practical insights on our entrepreneurship discussion. This post shows the first task (Recognizing Opportunities and Generating Ideas – chapter 2 in the book) under the 2nd step (Developing Successful Business Ideas – part 2 in the book). To download the presentation associated with this video in PDF, kindly go to the video in YouTube and click on the presentation’s link. To view all our posts for this book, kindly go here.

Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurial Business Opportunities:

The book provides four main characteristics for successful opportunities. The most crucial point here is that entrepreneurs must observe the market from the customer’s perspective, and act upon it by developing ideas that suit such opportunities or market gaps.

Ways of Recognizing Opportunities:

It’s not an easy task to recognize successful business opportunities. However, it’s not impossible. Here are ways to help you do that, which are interrelated. The first one concerns observing current trends that affect the present and the future, such as economic, social, technological, political and regulatory trends.

Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs:

Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who are able to spot and utilize opportunities. The book provides the following characteristics:

• They make their businesses on their fields of knowledge and experience;
• They have special cognitive skills;
• They are creative;
• They have strong and wide social networks, especially with people or entities that are related to the business field or to management & entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurial Ideas & Opportunities – Techniques for Generating Ideas :

To utilize an opportunity and fill out its market gap, successful ideas must be generated to build on the opportunity. The book provides four techniques:

• Brainstorming (Individual and/or in groups)
• Focus Groups
• Library & Internet Research
• Other Techniques, like searching for professional help from persons, entities or websites, such as quirky website, which is an American online service that receives unique entrepreneurial ideas, analyzes them, and then – if successful – changes them to real products/service, market & sell them, then provides royalties for the idea owner for every unit transaction.

No idea can be put into action unless it’s carefully studied via the procedure of “Feasibility Analysis”, which is our discussion topic for the next session.

That was our discussion for today. Thank you so much for reading and following us.  Watch and follow us each Thursday on your channel Management with Merits – Manage to Prosper. Subscribe to the channel in YouTube and activate the notifications bell there. Follow us, participate with us and share the channel and all its electronic contact platforms.