What is opportunity recognition

To become an opportunity, an idea needs to be evaluated and acted upon.

To become a business opportunity, your idea needs to have a potential economic value:

• It needs to be able to create profit. There have to be customers willing to pay for the product.
• It should also be new and innovative.
• It also needs to be attractive and desirable for people who want to buy it.

There are two ways to recognise opportunities:

• You can discover them or
• You can create them yourself and with others.

Entrepreneurs discover opportunities when they search for them in existing markets. This means they observe technological, economic or social trends. Recognising opportunities is a cognitive process. It relies on the ability of people to recognise patterns and connect the dots.

Entrepreneurs create opportunities when they engage with others in bouncing ideas back and forth, and each time it becomes more specific what the user needs are and how they are going to be solved. Creating opportunities is a social process. It relies on the ability of entrepreneurs to interact.

Main take away message
There are two ways to recognise opportunities: discovering or creating. It is up to you as an entrepreneur which way is most suitable for you and which actions to take to enable opportunity recognition.