Opportunity Identification and Structural Alignment

The identification of promising opportunities is at the root of entrepreneurial pursuits. Stated broadly, opportunity identification involves entrepreneurs' efforts to find or imagine promising business ideas for their new ventures. The main difficulty of opportunity identification is that opportunity ideas are about the future; this implies that opportunity ideas are fundamentally uncertain. Even if an entrepreneur's idea is to copy a business that already exists and was successful in a different part of the country (or of the world), it is still not possible to know for sure what is really needed to make this business successful in one's own particular context, with the particular customers and competitors one is facing. Indeed, this problem becomes even more significant [Page 357]if the idea is about a ...