How To Discover Business Opportunities

Keep Discovering Opportunities

The heart of the opportunity-driven achievements and business development

Entrepreneurial opportunity is a perceived first-seize-gain-most chance to create and deliver innovative value profitably.

Opportunity-driven Business Development

Be a Magnet of Opportunities

Search for Opportunities Always and Everywhere

Search for opportunities always and everywhere – and opportunities will search for you.

Vadim Kotelnikov

Yin and Yang of Discovering Opportunities

YIN (passive, accepting side)

YANG (active, aggressive side)

Learning

cross-pollinating ideas, thinking outside-in, empathizing with and listening to the customer, acquiring explicit and tacit knowledge and developing intuition skills through immersion in an industry, a subject, or an area of expertise, or observing people, and opening up to incidental discoveries

Exploring

asking searching questions, thinking inside-out, thinking outside the box; playing entrepreneurial simulation games with promising opportunities; experimenting; prototyping, analyzing feedback, freedom to fail and turning failures to new opportunities, test marketing

Don't talk about a problem; talk about an opportunity. Turning problems to opportunities is a winning habit of successful entrepreneurs and innovators.

Vadim Kotelnikov

Articulated customer dissatisfaction is an entrepreneurial opportunity for value innovation.

Vadim Kotelnikov

5 Things You Must Know To Win

Victory comes from finding opportunities in problems.

Sun Tzu

The Art of War

7 Sources of Entrepreneurial Opportunities

1. The unexpected – the unexpected success, the unexpected failure, the unexpected outside event. More

Peter
Drucker

The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.

Winston Churchill

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." ~ Thomas Alva Edison More Opportunity Quotes

*Incremental vs.* Radical Innovation Projects**
	Incremental	Radical
Idea Generation & Opportunity Recognition	Occur at the front end; critical events are largely anticipated	Occur sporadically throughout the life cycle, often in response to discontinuities in the project trajectory
... More

Discovering Opportunities

Three Tasks

Search: Search for opportunity ideas by scanning the external business environment as well as internal resources and capability
Portfolio Development: Develop a portfolio of implementable opportunities
Selection: Evaluate and select opportunities for implementation experimentation

Inspirational Quotes

Attitude

"The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity." ~ Winston Churchill ... More

Evaluating Opportunities

Selected Techniques

Create Greater Value for People Around You

To be able to help people achieve more and solve their problems in a caring value-added way, ask yourself these searching questions constantly:

How can I be a better problem solver and opportunity finder?... More

Purpose

Opportunity discovery is at the heart of the opportunity approach to business development. This needs to be a natural element in your company's range of activities.

Honing Your Competitive Edge

Discovering and taking advantage of opportunities that others don't see is a key to developing and honing your competitive edge, no matter what industry you're in or what your role is. Seeing and seizing opportunities are skills that can be applied universally, if you have the curiosity, commitment, and a framework.³

Optimistic Thinking

Changing your perspective is the key to finding success in seeming failure. "Optimistic thinking has sometimes gotten a bad rap as being unrealistic, but research has found that we can indeed live happier, healthier, and more successful lives if we can learn to discover opportunities in problems."³ Due to optimistic positive thinking, problems will become merely challenging opportunities that you can turn to your advantage. They provide opportunities for personal growth and can stimulate your creativity for finding better ways to live.

Creative Leadership

Creative leaders search for and discover opportunities, introduce positive change and make quantum leaps forward in creating new products and processes... More

Experimentation: The Key to Discovery

Experimentation means trying something new and unproven – and acknowledging that you cannot reliably predict the outcome.

Failure As a Stepping Stone To Success

Discovering what works requires that you understand the casual links between inputs and outputs. When it comes to searching for cause-effect relationships, perhaps the most suitable model that emerges is the method of experimentation that allows the most efficient scientific progress, the scientific method as a model for discovery.¹... More

Learning Opportunities

A major American enterprise with a diverse group of huge businesses, GE is steeped in a learning culture and it is this fact that makes GE a unique company. As Jack Welch puts it: "What sets GE apart is a culture that uses diversity as a limitless source of learning opportunities, a storehouse of ideas whose breadth and richness is unmatched in world business. At the heart of this culture is an understanding that an organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive business advantage."

Technology Roadmapping

The task of the technology roadmap team is to evaluate commercial opportunities arising from technology developments. Technology roadmaps help you to identify new business opportunities, validate internal knowledge and communicate ideas, improve your technology portfolio decisions, and develop effective technology strategy... More

Best Practice Strategic Problem Solving Lessons from McKinsey

Pluck the Low-hanging Fruit

Sometimes in the middle of the problem-solving process, opportunities arise to get an easy win, to make immediate improvements, even before the overall problem has been solved.

Seize those opportunities! They create little victories for you and your team. They boost morale and give you added credibility by showing anybody who may be watching that you’re on the ball and mean business... More

Case in Point Dell Inc.

"Our success is due, in part, to not just an ability but a willingness to look at things differently," writes Michael Dell³, the Founder of Dell Inc. "I believe opportunity is part instinct and part immersion – in an industry, a subject, or an area of expertise. Dell is proof that people can learn to reorganize and take advantage of opportunities that others are convinced don't exist. You don't have to be a genius, or a visionary, or even a college graduate to think unconventionally. You just need a framework and a dream."

Success Factors...

The Three Rules of Work...

Turning Risks Into Opportunities...

Turning Failures Into Opportunities...

Turning Knowledge into Opportunities...

Turning Customer Problems Into Business Opportunities...

Turning Failed Projects Into New Opportunities...

Take a Different View...

Effective Questioning...

Experimentation...

Discovering Opportunities: Main Ways...

Discovering Opportunities: Six Activities...