asylum-seekers constantly present themselves, together with the considerable challenges of how to create a viable and sustainable business model which avoids grant-dependency, and developing the skills and confidence people need to make the business happen.
These are the main reasons why people select the type of opportunities they do. As suggested in the section on contextual learning, the prior experience, knowledge and social connections which people develop play a significant part in forming their choices and enabling them to recognise opportunities which others would not. Sometimes, this prior learning may blinker people and prevent them from seeing better, more rewarding opportunities. However, prior experience and learning reduce risk, and the track record of people pursuing business opportunity completely outside their previous experience shows it is considerably more risky. An example is the chairman of a successful furniture retailing business who, after achieving a merger and flotation of the business, was invited to chair an engineering business. Having spent his careei in furniture retailing, and despite very highly developed managerial skills, he did not have the experience to understand the very different context of the engineering business, which came close to failure as a result. Contextual learning is therefore extremely important in entrepreneurial learning and opportunity selection.