Modern Management: concepts and skills, 14/e

Opportunity Identification

Although an opportunity may exist, entrepreneurs will not be able to take advantage of it unless they are first able to identify the opportunity. Research suggests, though, that opportunities do not appear in a standard form and that individuals differ in their abilities to identify opportunities.16 Intuitively, these differences in discernment are a good thing: If all individuals were equally able to identify opportunities, then they might all rush to exploit the same opportunities.

Which factors help determine whether individuals are able to identify opportunities? In the remainder of this section, we describe four such factors: entrepreneurial alertness, information asymmetry, social networks, and the ability to ...