CHAPTER 3
Recognizing and Shaping an Opportunity
SUMMARY AND AUTHOR’S NOTE
The essence of entrepreneurship is recognizing and creating opportunity. To become more
opportunistic, students first need to energize their creative skills and work to enhance them. The
ability to think “out of the box,” to look at the world upside down and backwards, is critical to
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will be able to:
• Understand the nature of entrepreneurial opportunity through discovery and creation.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
OPENING CASE: A Genius Inventor with a Passion for Life—Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu
I. Creativity: What It Means—the creative process in entrepreneurship
• Figure 3.1—Creativity Themes
12 Chapter 3: Recognizing and Creating Opportunity
II. Developing Creative Skills—removing roadblocks to creative thinking
a. Design an Environment to Stimulate Creativity—ways to make an environment
more conducive to creativity
MAKE A CONNECTION—group exercise
b. Log Ideas—the importance of journaling ideas
CREATIVITY ACTION PLAN—list of action items to improve creativity
III. Creativity and Problem Solving—finding opportunities by identifying a problem and
seeking a solution
a. Define the Problem—the importance of defining a problem correctly
• Figure 3.3—Decision Tree for Simple Videoconferencing System for the
Elderly
RELEVANT CASE STUDIES
Case 5 B2P
Case 8 Demand Media
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS ON KEY ISSUES
1. Give an example to demonstrate that you understand the difference between an idea and an
opportunity.
You might also consider having students start with an idea and turn it into an opportunity.
Chapter 3: Recognizing and Creating Opportunity 13
2. Identify the challenges you face in becoming more creative. What three things will you do
to address those challenges?
This question gets students to reflect on their creative talents and how they spend their
3. Pick a business in your community and find a creative way to change either the
product/service or the way it is delivered to the customers. How does your innovation add
value to the business and how can that value be captured?
This can be a very creative exercise, particularly if you encourage students to pick fairly
4. How is invention different from innovation? Which is more common today, and why?
Invention is fundamentally discovering something that did not exist before. Innovation is
SUGGESTIONS FOR EXPERIENCING ENTREPRENEURSHIP
1. Spend an afternoon walking around your community or your university or college campus.
Don’t look for anything in particular. Observe the things that you don’t normally pay
attention to when you’re in a hurry. Watch people—what they do and don’t do. At the end
of the afternoon, write down all the thoughts that come to you based on your afternoon of
observation. Which of these ideas could possibly become a business opportunity and why?
You might ask students to bring a list of three to five ideas they have from their day of
2. Pick one of the sources of new product/service ideas discussed in the section of this chapter
that starts on page 57. Using that source, come up with an opportunity that has business
potential. Then, using the Internet or talking to people in that industry (always the best
approach), develop a brief report that supports the viability of this opportunity.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE MATERIAL
My Favorite Creative Exercises
These exercises have been handed down from many colleagues, and some form of them can be
found in almost any book on creativity. Have fun with them, and your students will too.
Creative Activity 1: Find Your Team
Purpose: To discover common backgrounds and form teams.
In this exercise, the goal is for students to introduce themselves to as many people as possible in
Creative Activity 2: Pass the Problem
Purpose: To discover multiple solutions and opportunities from a single problem.
In teams, each person should think about a current problem or concern that needs a solution or a
Discussion Questions
1. Did anyone discover novel solutions that you had not previously considered?
Chapter 3: Recognizing and Creating Opportunity 15
Creative Activity 3: Taking Advantage of a Disconnect
Purpose: To experience the opportunity-creation process; to learn that one core invention can
produce multiple applications and opportunities.
This exercise is based on the premise that many opportunities are created by going through a
process that involves
• Connecting dissimilar concepts
The students form groups of three to five. Someone in each group should turn a piece of paper
into a paper airplane. Then the group decides on a word that they are going to write on the paper
airplane. It should be a noun. When all the groups have written a word on their airplanes, at the
signal of the instructor, each group flies its plane to another group. It is that group’s job to add
another word to the plane. This pattern continues for four rounds. On the last two rounds, the
word may be an adjective, adverb, or noun.