Entrepreneur, but rather to know where ideas can be found, and how they can be captured. And most of all, what one can do with them.
Business opportunities
By business opportunity, we mean either a business (or activity) start up or takeover opportunity, or the development of an internal start up within an existing company. The notion of opportunity has always been, and still is, subject to numerous attempts to define it. For Schumpeter (1934), one derives from the other when he suggests that entrepreneurial opportunity results from ‘a new combination of production factors, which manifest sit self through the introduction of anew product, a new production process, a new market, a new source of supply, or finally, a new form of industrial organisation’. For the Austrian economist Kirzner (1983), opportunity stems from a dysfunction in the market: ‘an imperfection or economic unbalance, which can be exploited by the entrepreneur who will thus restore the market balance’. Opportunity here is considered as a source of profit made possible by the existence of a solvable demand and the availability of necessary resources. For Casson (1982), opportunities are ‘occasions when new goods, new services, raw materials and organisation methods can be introduced and sold at a higher price than their cost of production’. In this approach too, opportunity and novelty go hand in hand. Other points of view give more importance othe individual’s subjectivity.For instance ,Steven sonandJarillo (1990) define opportunity in reference to ‘a future situation deemed both desirable and feasible’. Regarding the emergence of opportunities, two schools of thought are opposed, one that sees this notion as an objective reality, identifiable as such, and one that postulates that opportunity is a social construction born from the interactions and confrontations between individuals and their environment. From this point of view, opportunitieswoulddevelopfollowinganemergenceprocess.Thesetwoperspectives are not necessarily incompatible. In economic theory, a business is often presented as the meeting point of supply and demand. In this respect, the market may generate gaps conducive to the emergence of new organisations. A business start-up would become the answer to a ‘de-adjustment’ of supply and demand. The market would thus generate opportunities. But supposing they really exist, these opportunities