Recognizing the Difference between ideas and opportunities

If there is any single spark that ignites and entrepreneurial explosion, it is opportunity. There is certainly no lack of ideas for new or improved products or services. Entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, and college students abound with new ideas. However, there are far more ideas than good business opportunities. This is because an idea is not necessarily and opportunity. Although at the center of an opportunity is always an idea, not all ideas are opportunities. To understand this crucial distinction, it is necessary to understand that entrepreneurship is a market-driven process. An opportunity is attractive, durable, and timely and is anchored in a product or service that creates or adds value for its buyer or end-user. Opportunities are created because there are changing circumstances, inconsistencies, chaos, lags or leads, information gaps and a variety of other vacuums in the market and because there are entrepreneurs who can recognize and take advantage of these imperfections. In addition, successful new ventures are invariably anchored in opportunities with rewarding, forgiving, and durable gross margins and profits.

The challenge, then, is recognizing an opportunity buried in often contradictory data, signals, and the inevitable noise and chaos of the marketplace, since the more imperfect the market, that is, the greater the gaps, asymmetries, and inconsistencies of knowledge and information, the more abundant the opportunities. A skillful entrepreneur can shape and create and opportunity where others see little or nothing or see it too early or too late. After all, if recognizing and seizing an opportunity were simply a matter of using available techniques, checklists, and other screening and evaluation methods, we might have far more than the one in five businesses that had sales in 1990 of over $2 million. Why? Because the literature on techniques for screening and evaluating ideas indicates that over two hundred such methods have been developed and documented.


Tomado de: Brygrave William "The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship" Capítulo 2, pág. 34.