Entrepreneurial opportunity identification: bring the gap between Research and its applications!

Lately, I have been participating in a course given by Prof. Gruber at the college of management of technology at EPFL on entrepreneurial opportunity identification and exploitation.

Here, I would like to make a brief resume of what I found interesting during recent discussions that we had in the program. This is about the very early stage of entrepreneurship when one might search or discover, through a mere idea or a technology, feasible market applications. I hope, this would be helpful for those researchers who seek to found a start-up or simply apply their knowledge in the “real world”.

1. Discovery of market opportunities depends on the information that people already possess. In a simpler world, different people might see different applications in a single technology or idea partly because of their different background. What you may see as a researcher as a potential application of the technology, may not be the only possible opportunity. It seems that it might be beneficial to make a heterogonous team to have some other feedbacks.

2. Identification and analysis of different opportunities in the market would help, later, in the productivity of the founded companies. This suggests that maybe looking at one or two alternative markets before entering to one might increase the chance to succeed. One should find a compromise between the effort, time and money that should be spent on this identification and the added value that it could bring to the market.

References:

Scott Shane, ‘prior knowledge and the discovery of the entrepreneurial opportunities’, Organization Science, 2000, vol. 11, No. 4, pp 448-469

Class notes of the mentioned course.