Most entrepreneurial firms are started with finding the opportunities. The opportunity is very importance. It is a favorable set of circumstances that creates the need for a new product, service, or business idea. An opportunity has four essential qualities: it is attractive, durable, timely and anchored in a product, service or business that creates or adds value for its buyer or end user. The entrepreneurs usually use three ways to identify an opportunity. There are observing trends, solving a problem and finding gaps in the marketplace.
Entrepreneurial opportunities as situations in which new goods, services, raw materials, markets and organizing methods can be introduced through the formation of new means, ends, or means-ends relationships. These situations do not need to change the terms of economic exchange to be entrepreneurial opportunities, but only need to have the potential to alter the terms of economic exchange. In addition, unlike optimizing or satisfying decisions, in which the ends that the decision maker is trying to achieve and the means that the decision maker will employ are given, entrepreneurial decisions are creative decisions.
One of the important opportunities is window of opportunity. When the window of opportunity open, it can help a firm enters a new market. As the market grows, firm enter and try to establish a profitable position. The computer, for example, paved the way for the Internet, which, in turn, paved the way for search engines and software to explore the World Wide Web, which, in turn, created a new way for people to shop and obtain valuable information, and on and on. A wealthy economy is one teeming with superior contributions and the entrepreneurial opportunities created by them.
Opportunities can also be classified on whether the changes that generate them exist on the demand or the supply side. In general, the entrepreneurship studies implicitly focuses on supply side changes. For example, most discussions of opportunity concern changes in inputs, ways of organizing, production processes, or products. But changes in demand alone can generate opportunities. Customer preferences influence the allocation of resources because producers need to respond to the preferences and purchasing habits of consumers. Thus, demand changes from exogenous shifts in culture, perception, tastes, or mood can open up opportunities. The opportunity is created if the increase in demand outpaces investments in production capacity, generating opportunities to add more capacity, perhaps on more economic terms. In addition, growing markets might create new niches as well as the opportunity to specialize
In fact, the entrepreneurs improve established products and services, or they create new ones. With them, the opportunities that can find in the recent business are very important. Therefore, they must use every condition to develop these opportunities. For example, the discovery that seaweed could be sold as a food in the United States as well as Japan generates the opportunity for entrepreneurial activity, as did the discovery that oil provided a better fuel than many other raw materials previously discovered. In brief, new methods of production, such as the assembly line or computer-aided drug discovery, have provided opportunities for entrepreneurial profit.
The creation of a new good or service can create an opportunity for entrepreneurial profit, as is the case when the development of accounting software or a surgical device makes possible a product or service that can be sold for greater than its cost of production. However, as we have seen from the development of the Internet, new modes of organizing that do not require bricks and mortar locations also generate opportunities for entrepreneurial profit.
Opportunity conditions are defined by the amount, variety, and source of feasible solutions. For example, some industries may benefit from advances in basic scientific understanding, such as biotechnology or semiconductors, while others may not. Opportunity conditions are most favorable when for a given investment the likelihood of achieving innovation is high and when it is possible to use a single development for multiple solutions.