Unlocking Entrepreneurial Success: How Design Thinking Can Help You Spot and Seize Opportunities
"Re-evaluating the Agent-Opportunity Nexus Through a Design Lens"
The pursuit of opportunities is central to entrepreneurship. Initially, research assumed that how opportunities arose had little impact on identifying and capitalizing on them. However, as studies delved into the specifics of opportunity identification, nuances emerged concerning how opportunities form and their mediating effects. This led to the divergence of views between 'discovery' and 'creation,' each with differing assumptions about the world.
The debate between discovery and creation has been primarily conceptual, with empirical investigation hampered by the challenge of distinguishing opportunities from non-opportunities. Calls for pragmatic, process-oriented methodologies have grown, aiming to reconcile these differing perspectives. Now, a new body of research suggests viewing opportunities as design artifacts that arise from a hierarchical entrepreneurial system, advocating for a design science approach to understand their artificiality.
In this design-centric view, an opportunity involves both discovery and creation, contingent on three conditions: existence and agent discovery, agent recognition and value realization, and market acknowledgment and value validation. While seemingly straightforward, this process lacks detail regarding the nature of opportunity, the agent's discovery process, value recognition, and the validation's significance. These unanswered questions are critical to fully understanding the design view of opportunities.
From Idea to Opportunity: The Fundamentals of Design Thinking in Entrepreneurship
The traditional views of opportunity—discovery and creation—assume objective and subjective existences, respectively. The discovery view posits opportunities as objective states formed by market and technological shifts, awaiting perceptive agents. Conversely, the creation view sees opportunities as subjective states shaped by human action and cognitive abilities. Both perspectives agree that opportunity possesses intrinsic value, necessitating agency for any outcome. This mirrors design, where an agent acts to transform an existing situation into a desired one. Design seeks to align an artifact with its context, requiring agency as the main driver.
- Agent Dissatisfaction: An agent recognizes shortcomings in the current situation, sparking a desire for change.
- Environmental Triggers: External events or challenges prompt the agent to explore the unknown between the current and intended states.
- Artifact Reflection: The agent intentionally analyzes existing artifacts, dissecting their connections to users and the environment to identify potential improvements.
The Future of Opportunity: Design Thinking and Entrepreneurial Success
This study emphasizes the importance of human agency in design and, by extension, in recognizing and shaping opportunities. Opportunities are considered dynamic, incomplete, and continuously evolving. Studying an opportunity means understanding the process by which an artifact is created and adapted to achieve its goals. This approach addresses survivor bias and provides a foundation for future research into opportunity emergence and evolution, substantiating the design view of opportunities and advancing knowledge of opportunity identification and exploitation.