Business Ideas

The process of creating or
seizing an opportunity is less the result of a deliberate search than it is a
mindset of maintaining a form of vigilance that is sensitized to business
opportunity. Successful entrepreneurs recognize an opportunity while it is still
taking shape.
Richard Branson, billionaire founder of Virgin Records and
Virgin Atlantic Airlines, may be better known for his efforts to circle the
globe in a hot-air balloon than for his business successes. He suggests that
“Being an adventurer and an entrepreneur are similar… You’re willing to go where
most people won’t dare.”
But it is still generally accepted that entrepreneurs are
skillful at knowing which risks are worth taking. “In everything I do, I examine
the downside, the danger, what can go wrong,” says Branson. When he started his
airline, he only bought one plane, with an agreement with Boeing to take that
back “if things didn’t work out.”
Are there any safeguards against failure? No! Even the best
conceived and implemented business ventures can become market experiments that
simply did not work. Our goal here is to follow a planning process that can
minimize risk. That is the best that we can do, and the degree to which we can
enhance our confidence about a venture must enter into any decision about its
pursuit.
The best approach requires patience, and to a commitment to
preparation well in advance of start-up. This could be a long-range process of
getting to better understand one's strengths, weaknesses, and limitations, and
setting about filling knowledge and experience gaps. During this period, we
should constantly generate ideas with the potential of becoming real business
opportunities.
Where do business ideas come from? The best source is what
you know. Often, ideas come from work experience or from personal interests,
such as hobbies; other ideas can come from friends and relatives, and our
educational background. Ideas may be easy enough to generate, but an idea is not
necessarily an opportunity! Building a "better mousetrap" does not insure
success; other factors include fit, timing, and resources.
Jeff Timmons, in his book
New Venture Creation, suggests that “An
opportunity is attractive, durable, and timely and is anchored in a
product or service that creates or adds value for its buyer or end user.
Opportunities are created because there are changing circumstances,
inconsistencies, chaos, lags, or leads, information gaps, and a variety of other
vacuums, and because there are entrepreneurs who can recognize and seize them.”
The process of creating or seizing an opportunity is less
the result of a deliberate search than it is a
mindset of maintaining a form of vigilance that is sensitized to
business opportunity. Successful entrepreneurs recognize an opportunity while it
is still taking shape. This frequently relates to the prospective entrepreneur's
current profession or interests, where he or she perceives:
*
a process that can be more efficiently performed,
* an attractive new service or improvement of an existing
service, or
* some business or geographic "niche" that is being
underserved.
There are often localized opportunities, based on
geography, natural resources, human resources in local abundance, and the like.
Can you think of any for your area?
Once an idea is thought to represent a real opportunity,
one must be able to research the market, know what data is important and how to
gather it meaningfully, and know what actions this information indicates. This
can then be worked into a rather detailed plan, and then refined into a
blueprint for success.
John B. Vinturella, Ph.D. has more than
40 years' experience as an educator, manager, entrepreneur, and strategist. He
founded and ran a highly successful business for 20 years. He is the author of “8 Steps to
Starting a Business,” and “The Entrepreneur's Fieldbook”
and co-author of “Raising Entrepreneurial Capital,” now in its second edition.